Getting Your Ad Targeted
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The first step in narrowing the audience to which your ad is displayed is to use the ‘Phrase Match’ feature in AdWords. This limits your ad to those searches that include your search phrases in order. To activate the ‘Phrase Match’ feature, simply enclose your search terms in quotation marks, for example, “Palm Pilot”. Now, only those terms that includes both Palm and Pilot in that order will be shown your ad, such as: free palm pilot, palm pilot software, and palm pilot V.
This may be a good first step for some, but I’ve found that it’s necessary to refine the distribution of my ads even further by using the ‘Exact Match’ feature. This is particularly useful for increasing the click through rates of poorly performing ads. The ‘Exact Match’ feature will only display your ads when the exact search phrase is entered. The ‘Exact Match’ feature is activated once you place parentheses around your search term. In our example, we’d use the term [Palm Pilot]. Now, only the exact search term ‘Palm Pilot’ will cause our AdWords ad to be displayed.
The third tool is ‘Negative Keywords’. This feature simply excludes your ad from displaying alongside the search results of any keywords you choose. If you’re selling a product or service, you may want to use ‘free’ as a negative keyword, thus preventing your ad from displaying when the word ‘free’ is part of the search phrase. To enable negative keywords you simply place a minus sign in front of your search term. If, in our example, we wanted to exclude all searches for ‘free palm pilot’ and ‘palm pilot software’, our keyword list would include the following entries:
- Free
- Software
Use of these targeting features will instantly place you into an elite category of Google AdWords users who have click through and conversion rates at the top of their categories. Next up to The Search Engine Optimization tutorial: How to Set up Your Bid and Creative Strategies for Successful bidding…
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