Google Ads Keyword Match Types

Please give me a moment. I'm having some technical issues today and it should be working fine. Any of you watching live right now? If you can see and hear me fine, would you mind giving a little yes In the comment box, so I know everything is working as it should be. Think it is working fine...We are live and we had quite a bit of techy issues today seems to be working, good.

Okay. Thank you. Welcome, Alamgir. Thanks very much. Just give me a moment. I'll get all my files and everything. Ready, desktop. Good. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. Yes, we are live. Apologies. I had to restart the computer at least five times and now it seems to be behaving itself and I don't know what happened, but there you go!

The technical issues and the internet, we just love it, don't we?! But most of the time it works fine. Sometimes it does have a hiccup or two, but we are pretty much good to go. Brilliant. Okay. So, thanks for bearing with me and being here, today is the 23rd of September. It's not four o'clock it's 20 past four today and we're getting started.

My name is Uzair and every weekday, myself and my wife, Farzana, we log online and go through topics such as Google Ads, digital marketing, sales funnels, advertising, pretty much anything and everything to do with your business and how you can get more leads, sales, and be more profitable. Following on from last week's theme of Google Ads for beginners, I'm going to carry on the theme, today I'm going to talk about the various keyword match types that there are in the Google Ad account.

Let me open up my spreadsheet before we start. If you are new here, the format is I'm going to go through the keyword match types now and towards the end of the session. Any questions you may have, please put them in the comment box on the right-hand side of the video or underneath the video and I'll try and answer them for you to the best of my abilities.

Okay. So, let's get started with the Google Ads, keyword match type, what they are, why they are different, how they're used and how it affects your campaign. I'll zoom in a bit more so you guys can see the screen a bit better... So, this is not in any particular order, exact match, phrase match. Some people call it broad modifier or broad modified.

Both of them are broad negative keywords. So, yesterday I explained about how you set up these keywords in an ad group. You can either have them all in the same ad group, as long as it's the same keyword or similar keywords, or you can have them in separate ad groups. So, how does it affect your campaigns? How does it affect your ads showing up or not and when and why you should use any particular match type?

The most asked question I'm sent is "Which is my favourite or the best keyword match?" Well, as far as the best one goes there isn't any, as far as the favourite one goes negative keywords is my most favourite because they save me the most money and make me the most profit. It stops my ads from showing up on search queries, which I don't want to show up for.

So, I'm going to go through all these four different match types and how it works. Let's say we've got, football shoes or shoe, so with the exact match, what you need to do is you need to put a square bracket in the front and at the end of the keyword, whether it is a one-word keyword or you've got multiple words in that phrase, you can have as many as you want, but this is how the exact match works this way Google knows that your keyword is football shoes and you are only targeting this shoe.

Now, unfortunately in Google Ads, an exact match is not exact match anymore. What that means is, going back, I think a year or so ago if I put in football shoe, it will only show up for that keyword, but now Google can potentially show your ad for similar keywords to my seed keyword. Although soccer is pretty much football, but if you don't want to show for soccer, you will need to make sure that you have a negative keyword in your word list.

So, as I said, negative, an exact match is not exact match anymore. It will go for other similar keywords, which are similar to your main exact, what it will not show for is when somebody puts in that. So, when somebody puts in Google best football shoe, cheapest football shoe, and so on it will not show up for that, or somebody puts in football shoe price.

Something like, because it has got more words than what we are. We've got in our exact match. Let's move onto the next one, which is the phrase match. So, let's keep the same football shoes, football. In the phrase match. You need to have these quotation marks or quote marks before or after and after the last, you don't need to, if you've got multiple words, you don't need to have a quotation in between the words only at the beginning and at the end, just like the exact match keyword.

So, if I put in football, Nike, the way the phrase match works is you cannot have these two words broken with a word in between these two. So, you can have a word before or after so, if I put in not a good example, football shoes, Nike. We've got the word cheap, best and Nike is going to run.

Google is going to run the ad. If somebody puts in something like football kids' shoes, men's shoes for football, or even we can have large shoe football, I know it doesn't sound right, but I'm just giving it as an example. The order of these two words need to be exactly the same. But in this case, shoe and football is the other way around, so your ad will not show.

Plus, it has got another one. So, even if somebody puts in the word like that, it will not show. Your ads will not show, but both of these words need to be in the same order, but it can have any number of words before or after and this is where quite a bit of confusion happens as to why you need this because phrase match will give you a fair amount of control, especially when you've got two or more words if you want to put in something like, let's say mens.

Now, you see how tight your relevancy to the search term is because if somebody is putting in cheap football shoes it's never going to show up because you are exactly targeting men's football shoes so any time somebody puts in men's football shoes it's going to target. It's not going to run for ladies or kids or any other kinds of football shoes, other than the men's and it needs to be in that order.

If you find in your search term queries, or in your keyword research, that people are also searching for football shoes men, then you should add another keyword of that phrase match, football shoes men. So, this is how you will get a lot of control back to your campaigns. Exact match will have the least amount of search terms and impressions, but it will, it has got the highest intent because what you have put up as a keyword and what people are searching for is exactly the same.

Now, I will have a bit of a problem here because in Google Sheets, whenever you put up a plus sign, it doesn't like it, it thinks that I'm trying to make a formula and it's going to give me an error, plus football and plus shoe, before every word, you've got to have a plus sign with no space in between.

So, you can't have like that. Neither you can have it like that, but after the first word you put in the space, if you got more words over here, plus men. So, before every word you put in the plus with no spacing is really important and then the space at the end, then the next one plus, and so on, I'll need to take this out because otherwise, we're going to get an error message, but this expands our campaign a bit and it gives us a bit more broad.

It's not going too broad, but it is giving us a bit more reach on the search term queries, because what this does is it's going to allow us to hunt and fish for new search terms or queries, which we don't know about, or we have not put them in our campaign. So, that's that. As long as these three words are on that search query, in any order, your ad will trigger, so, I can put in men large Adidas football shoe or something like that.

It doesn't matter how many words we have. As long as the word football, shoe and men is on that search term, it will trigger. So, where it won't trigger is again. If somebody puts in, because we don't have the word men in that phrase, it's not going to trigger. So, it gives us a fair amount of control of showing our ads without going crazy, like a broad match.

Cause you don't want to, unless you've got big budgets and you want to go target as many keywords or search terms as you want, then good luck. But I would not recommend that. You run with broad match. If you are on a limited budget because it could potentially show your ad for these kinds of things. I'm not saying it will, it potentially can because Google is thinking shoes, similar sporting shoes or tennis shoes or something like that.

I don't run broad match in our company at all. We never do. The most keywords which we use is obviously the broad modified and the exact and negative keywords. Negative keywords, as I said, is your best friend it's going to save you a ton of money and it's going to make your campaigns more profitable. Because when you stop your ads being shown and clicked on unwanted or irrelevant search term queries, because what people do, they don't look, they'll search for something and whatever comes up sometimes without reading, they'll click it by accident or not.

But, it does get clicked and then they'll find, Oh, I wasn't looking for football shoes. I was looking for something else and they're going to bounce off your website and it has cost you that click, that's what you want to keep in mind. A very aggressive workflow, I should say when putting up negative keywords, negative search terms as negative terms in your account, because as you keep on adding more negative keywords it's going to make your campaigns a lot more leaner, stronger, meaner, and compact and only for those search terms, you want your ad to be triggered.

It will show, and then you're going to get very targeted traffic to your website and what this will do is it's going to make your budget last longer throughout the day. It's going to spend less money on a wasted budget and more towards a good one. So, hope you got the idea as to how these match types work.

So, I'm going to go to the comments box now, and if you have any questions or problems you are facing, please put them in and I'll try my best to answer them for you. So once again, apologies for the delay in starting today. Just one of those things, couldn't be helped. So hello, TJ, Mike, Mustapha. Thank you for being here.

Okay. This is Manish from India, and I want to know the answers of a few questions. "How to create a custom intent audience and in-market audience in Google Ads with help of Google Analytics separately? Want to know in details about the bid strategy status?" So, the in-market audience and the custom intent is...they've now changed it in Google Ads.

The way you can set them up and I'm going to make a video on this very soon... In the market, the audience is anyone who has searched for a particular keyword in the past 14 days or 15 days or so, if somebody has searched for football shoes, you can target that keyword and make as an in-market audience and show it to people because you know that these are the people who are looking for football shoe.

You can also have a custom intent audience where you can target other websites, your competitors, or similar websites to what you are selling and then you tell Google what you are telling Google is I want to show my ads to these people who are going and visiting these kinds of webpages or e-commerce stores or something like that.

Then it's going to start to show ads to that. So, we kind of like are remarketing to your competitor's audience, if they are spending a lot of money on ads and you know that they are spending a lot, and they've got big budgets, a lot of traffic volume on the website, instead of hunting for cold traffic, why not just target those audiences as well as those people who are searching, who are the in-market audience.

It's a very powerful strategy, to run and run this all day long, because we can get a lot cheaper click on the Google Display Network, show our video ads, display ads, or, you know, responsive display ads. You set them up with videos, images, your logo, branding, etc and they work really, really well. I would highly recommend you do that.

I've got some already on display list on our channel search for the custom intent audiences, find the video. The second question (TJ): "Want to know in detail about the bid strategy status?" So, I'm not sure what you're saying, are you talking about what are the various bidding strategies you need to use, or which ones to use when, again, that is a whole session on its own.

I can talk on that all day long as to how to use it. So, there's a video on our channel, man versus machine that will be of interest to you. If you want to learn a bit more about smart bidding. (TJ): "How many types of audiences that we must create in Google analytics as beginner level?" You can create, you don't need to.

I think you're getting confused with what you can do in Google Analytics and what you also can do in Google Ads. If you are at a beginner level, there are a lot of audiences already built-in. So, you can link your analytics to your Google Ads account, import them in, and then just plug them in as observation mode.

If you've got hundred, put them up as hundred, doesn't matter, it is not going to affect your campaign results or anything as the word suggests it is on observation, it is not targeting. So, you can start to see the data coming in, and then you can see, okay, this audience is really working well. This isn't, then you can adjust the bids accordingly, or target that audience, but hope that answered your question, Manish.

Mike, "Do you know if account-level negative keywords work for smart campaign?" Shopping ones, I think they are and there are a couple of, that's a really good question and I'm going to answer that for you tomorrow because there are a couple, I think the TPA and TROW as you can, I'm pretty certain you can, but I'll come back.

Remind me, please. Tomorrow. If we are online, I will make a note of that. Hello, Lucy, Italy, good to see you here. Hi Adam, "If you pause underperforming ads within a campaign, will that change for negative short-term impact on the ad groups they own? Does Google machine learning need time to address?" It really depends if you are running a campaign on manual or on a smart bid, because if it's smart bidding, what I would recommend you do is put up responsive search ads, have multiple headlines, description lines, then whichever ones are not working, you can take them off, replace them with something different.

That's how I would do that. Or what you could do is you can put up a new ad, stop the underperforming one, but obviously it will take time to start running and Google is the quickest and easiest way to split test ads is responsive search ads or responsive... Mayur, "Which is best match type up for low-volume product?" I'm not sure what you mean by that though.

Volume product. Do you mean low volume search term keywords? I'm not sure what you're asking. Okay, brilliant. I think I've covered pretty much everything. Okay. Yes, it does not tell me what you mean by that question. So, perhaps you can rephrase it tomorrow if you can and so for now thank you guys for being with me today.

Apologies for being a bit late. Hopefully, we'll start again at four o'clock tomorrow afternoon. So, till then stay safe and I look forward to seeing you then..