Don’t advertise what you don’t sell – AdWords keywords match types
Now this post’s title is silly, of course you won’t advertise what you don’t sell? Let’s consider this case.
Suppose you sell tennis shoes and specify a keyword like tennis shoes. However you don’t sell tennis high-tops or sandals.
If you use tennis shoes as keywords, your ads might actually show when someone search for
- tennis sandals
- shoes for table tennis
- hightop tennis shoes
- how to clean tennis shoes
Now you definitely wont want to show your ads in these cases!
Here are several ways to prevent this wastage of your budget. Your ad can show for tennis sandals because Google can consider sandals as a synonym, a word or phrase with the same meaning, for shoes. To prevent that, we can use broad match modifier (second row) as it doesn’t allow synonyms
Phrase match requires the words to appear in the exact order i.e. “tennis shoes”, but will also show when people search for “hightop tennis shoes”.
Exact match means your ads will show only when someone search for “tennis shoes”, but does not include additional words like buy.
The simplest way in this case is to use negative keywords, which prevent your ads from showing when the query contains your specified keywords e.g. sandals, table, hightops.
Not only will using these match types save you unnecessary clicks, they will improve the quality of your ads and hence lower the cost you pay per click too.
Check through your account and see if you might be wasting unnecessarily!
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