Importance of Keywords in a PPC Campaign

To a large extent, search engine marketing is about identifying the most effective keywords for your Web site, and keywords in a pay-per-click advertising campaign are just as important as in a SEO campaign.

What is a keyword? A keyword is a word or phrase that people (consumers or businesses) would employ to locate information on the products or services or topic that they are interested learning more about or purchasing.

For example: A professional bull rider is interested in purchasing new boots. He turns on his computer and visits his favorite search engine.

In the search box he enters the keyword cowboy boots. In addition, he may also enter men’s cowboy boots, western cowboy boots, or authentic cowboy boots. Of course, since he is a cowboy, certain brands of boots are important so he might also enter designer cowboy boots, Justin cowboy boots, or Tony Lama cowboy boots.

Finally there are different styles of cowboy boots round toe cowboy boots, crepe sole cowboy bots, and narrow or point toe cowboy boots.

The core idea behind keywords is identifying the words or phrases that are important to your target audience and therefore will be the most effective to use on your Web site. When search engine visitors click on your PPC ad, they are sent to a page on your Web site. As an advertiser, you are only charged when a visitor clicks on your advertisement to visit your Web site.

Making sure you are bidding on keywords that people will be searching for is critical to the success of a pay-per-click advertising campaign. Up front it is all about visibility and the more eyeballs that see your ad if it is relevant to what they want, the better chance you have of making a sale or getting a lead.

Bidding on the wrong keywords will only frustrate you and waste your hard earned money. Bidding on the right keywords can bring you rich rewards but be warned, you will need to use bid management tools to research the cost of bids for your keywords because some good keywords can also break you. Incorporate some niche keywords into your search engine marketing campaign that might not cost you as much. You will also want to balance the keywords that will bring you visitors at the short end of the tail or buying cycle as well as the long end of the buying cycle.

Learn more about how to perform proper keyword research to identify what words are being used in searches today.

Keyword Matching

Once you determine what keywords you want to bid on, the next step is to decide what targeting match to use. In other words, how do you want the search engines to match them up to user queries? Do you want your ad served up only if the query is an exact match or is it ok to have other relevant words in the query string? If you decide to use broader matching, you might also want to apply a filter to keep out queries for certain words that do not apply to your product or service. For instance if you are a real estate broker, you might not want your ads showing for queries on “real estate exam”.

Exact Match

Although they may call it by a different name, Standard Match Type (Yahoo) or Exact Match (Google) the idea is the same. Your ad will only be served up only when a user searches for the specific word or phrase you are bidding on. Exact match is the most targeted option and recommended as the best way to start your pay-per-click advertising campaign. As you discover what your click through rate (CTR) is and you begin to feel comfortable with your PPC campaign, you may want to broaden your match type to include related searches. Yahoo’s standard matching also includes the singular and plural versions.

Phrase Match

Each search engine handles this type of matching differently. Google will display your ad when a user searches for your keyword and possibly with other terms in the query. For example if you are bidding on the phrase “peanut butter”, Google will return results if a user searches for “chunky peanut butter”.

Broad Match

Broad match is Google’s default, but don’t let that fool you. You could quickly spend a good percentage of your budget with broad match turned on if you don’t use bid management tools to define negative keywords to use in conjunction with it. Broad match includes your keyword phrase along with plurals and other relevant variations and are sometimes less targeted than the other options.

Advanced Match Type

Yahoo’s advanced match type displays your ad across their partner network to provide you with targeted leads.

Need Help Choosing Keywords? - How To Use Keywords