Keywords

From Adylitica

Keywords are words that determine where ad variants are shown.

When someone types in a search term into Google, they will be shown a SERP with results that match their query, both organic web pages and ad variants with keywords that match those in the query.

There are a number of ways to control what keywords are matched, as a general rule it's important to keep your ads very relevant to the keywords you are bidding on.

Contents 1 Keyword match types 2 Dynamic keyword insertion 3 Dead Keywords 4 Optimization

Keyword match types

If someone searches for something, they may use a single word, but more commonly people use multiple words in their searches.

By default if a keyword matches any word in those multiple searched words, your ad will be shown - however this is configurable by changing the keyword "match type", of which there are 4 options:

1. Broad match: keyword (default) - matches against any search including any words
2. Phrase match: "keyword phrase" - matches against searches including a specific phrase.
3. Exact match: [keyword] - matches against searches only that exactly match the specified keyword phrase.
4. Negative: -keyword - does not match against searches using the negative word

Dynamic keyword insertion

Google allows you to dynamically insert text into ad variants based on search terms.

The format for this is {keyword:defaultText}, where defaultText is what will show if the match is too long or won't work for another reason.

Tip: {KeyWord:defaultText} will capitalize the first letters of the words in the ad variant title.

This can be a good tool to improve CTR, because people click on words that match their query - however be warned: improved CTR can come at the cost of Conversions ratio.

Dead Keywords

Dead keywords are a way to refer to keywords that get zero or very few impressions.

It may seem that these keywords while not helping, are not actively hurting an ad group, however Google will actually lower the quality score of an ad group that has dead keywords. While it's a good idea to try a lot of keywords and ones that may not have a lot of traffic, it's also good idea to prune very inactive keywords on an ongoing basis. [1] [2]

Optimization

• Choose a small number of keywords for each ad group, un-targeted keywords will result in quality score penalties.
• Negative keywords are a powerful tool to improve ROI. Filtering out the searches that are unrelated to your conversions will save money.