Strike The Right Match Type: Part 1

Search marketing is all about targeting your audience with the right message at the right time, so that the campaign’s potential to convert is maximised.  Effective use of match types is critical to ensuring that you have maximum control over your search campaigns. 

This is easier said than done; three common mistakes made are:

1.    Overuse of broad match keywords
2.    The old triple-match trick
3.    Poor or no use of negative matches

Let’s look at these one at a time.

1. Overuse of broad match keywords   

Overuse of broad match is very common in PPC.  It’s very easy to allow Google’s matching algorithms to take control of your targeting.  Unless you are constantly reviewing your keyword lists, you’re not going to be controlling who sees what message and when.  This can equate to inflated CPCs, poorer CTR and lower conversion rates, all of which stand to make your paid search activity less efficient. 

Too often, we see disproportionate spend vs. revenue vs. ROI for different match types.  The example below shows a huge proportion of spend going through broad match keywords, generating a significantly smaller proportion of revenue:

Put simply, this advertiser is allowing Google to dictate which message/product/offer gets shown to the user (let’s not forget that this is also a potential customer!).  Would that advertiser allow someone to walk into their high street store and hang a sign saying “Women’s Clothing” over the menswear section?

2. The old triple-match trick  

It is a common misconception that triple-matching (having every single keyword on broad, phrase and exact match) leads to an optimal campaign.  This is not the case.  

Managing PPC at scale can often lead agencies and advertisers to take short cuts when building out keyword lists.  Concatenating a comprehensive list of seed terms and modifiers and then triple-matching the output might generate an impressive volume of keywords, but that volume is likely to be the very reason for a campaign becoming unmanageable.  Size, in this case, is definitely not everything.

For high and mid-volume terms it makes sense to invest time up front in utilizing the full range of match types.  For tail terms with low traffic volumes, triple-matching prior to seeing the behavior of those terms is likely to do more harm than good.  It will lead to account ‘bloating’ and make analysis and campaign optimization far more problematic than is necessary.

3.    Poor or no use of negative matches

Negative match types are underused by PPC campaign managers.   We spend so long trying to capture the right traffic by using qualified ad copy and leveraging positive matching, so it seems crazy that this vital step in the process is overlooked.  Time and again, search query reports show that advertisers are paying for traffic which is not relevant to their business, or a particular product.  

Stop by later this week for part 2 of this blog post, where we’ll outline some practical steps which can be taken to ensure you’re taking best advantage of the controls that match types can give. Alternatively I will be presenting this very topic at SES London tomorrow, so please stop by. 

Charli Rogers, UK Client Services Director

Comments

[Jamil Kassam]

Good post full of easy to implement tips on how to improve PPC campaigns. The following statement worries me very much though...

Negative match types are underused by PPC campaign managers.

This is one of the most effective ways of qualifying your traffic and ensuring you're not picking up bad clicks - if all PPC managers and agencies are not adding negatives for every campaign they run there is something wrong with them!