Success in Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns is depend on what words you use, and equally important what words you don’t use. Listing certain words to ignore can save you significant amounts of money on your campaign, and create a much more effective cost to benefit ratio.
There are two options at your disposal in Google and several of the other main PPC campaigns. We will focus on Google because it is the biggest. These are Phase Matching and Negative Keywords.
Phase matching as its name suggests is ascertaining how and where you want your campaign to be placed. Phase matching has three main components as follows:
- Broad Match: This options matches all of the words in your phase. For example, if you had a keyword of “travel” your advertisements would appear on searches for “travel to America”, “travel to Asia” or “travel to Australia” etc. This is the default option within Google.
- Phase Match: A phase match matches in with your exact words. For example if, “American Travel” was your phase then your phases would show up in searches such as “Cheap American Travel” but not “travel to America”.
- Exact Match: An exact match as its name suggest if for when you only want the words.
We like phase matching because this can help you choose cheaper key word advertisements which still obtaining quality traffic. For example “American Travel” may be a $0.50 per click where as “Travel to America” may be $1.00 per click.
In addition to using the above you can also use Negative Key Words. Negative Key Words are search words that you don’t want to have advertisements on. For example, if “American Travel” was your key phase words, you may wish to focus on air flights rather than train or bus. Therefore you would place train and bus (and all similar words) on the Negative Key Word list.
If you look at the words people are using to search through to your site you can quickly work out which words you can place in the negative keywords for your PPC campaign.
There are many ways to use PPC and increase your likelihood of success. Phase matching and negative key words are two more tools you can add to your arsenal!
