Has anyone ever tried a PPC Campaign using just exact or phrase matches?

[Ethan W.]

Just curious if anyones ever totally excluded broad phrase matches and only directed a campaign around phrase or exact matches?

[dburk]

Hi Ethan,

That should be your default method. Broad match can be useful for identifying new keywords but terrible for you main campaigns. If you are using broad match for anything other than an experiment you are just being lazy and wasteful.

[traceye]

Of course. I would never run a ppc campaign on broad matches - i'd lose too much money.

t

[Kahuna]

Originally Posted by traceye

Of course. I would never run a ppc campaign on broad matches - i'd lose too much money.

t

Is it not better to keep the broad keywords in but just have a detailed and comprehensive list of negaitives?

[dburk]

Originally Posted by Kahuna

Is it not better to keep the broad keywords in but just have a detailed and comprehensive list of negaitives?

No, It's best to have every likely exact match keyword. The two main reasons are that you can never cover every possibile negative due to the extended matching feature which cannot be turned off, and your Quality Scores will be diluted.

[DavidTheMavin]

That's all I've ever done for the past 2+ years.

[Kahuna]

Hey Don

I went and took a look at a campaign of mine then tried to come up with as many keywords as I could, basically like you say and ended up with nearly 10,000 keywords.

Am I on the right tracks doing this? Only problem was when I tried uploading it via adwords editor I had too many KW's in my account.

Is it difficult to get your account up graded?


Thanks for your help

[ShabirAli]

yes i tried with both , belive me man exact match works best.

[Robert Matthew]

Going Phrase and Exact to start is a great way to control your spending. One thing to consider though...I have been using broad match only for targeted but general keywords (does that make sense) for the offer I am promoting.

Then just check your logs to see some killer data coming in about what exactly people are searching for. It's almost like letting the market show you the keyword research. Then take those new found keywords, pause your broad match keywords and setup the new keywords using phrase and exact.

This will take up more of your budget, but I've found that it gets you profitable much quicker as well.

Take Care!

[dburk]

Originally Posted by Kahuna

Hey Don

I went and took a look at a campaign of mine then tried to come up with as many keywords as I could, basically like you say and ended up with nearly 10,000 keywords.

Am I on the right tracks doing this? Only problem was when I tried uploading it via adwords editor I had too many KW's in my account.

Is it difficult to get your account up graded?


Thanks for your help

Hi Kahuna,

Your account rep will look over your account and only approve an upgrade if it appears that you are using the available resources efficiently.

AdWords limits the number of keywords per campaign to 2000. If you breakup your campaigns so that there are no more than 2000 keywords per campaign, you can get up to 50,000 keywords per account without having to ask for an account upgrade.

Many of your long tails will have little or no impressions and you should purge the inactive ones to make run for more that may have searches. Keep in mind that if you get an average of only 2 or 3 clicks per month on 10,000 different keywords, you are looking at 600 - 1,000 clicks per day.

[Brian_Mahaffey]

You can also get another Adwords account and tie it to the one you are using now (I have 4). Google says you must inform them if you do this to abide by their terms.

[spires]

Exact Match give me the highest conversion rate by far.
However, you can get broad match to work if you focus a lot of your time and effort on finding the negative keywords.

[bimawarrior]

Hi Ethan,

I'm doing similiar to what Robert do, and I think if you have done enough research and you specificly target the action/buying keyword, you'll be safe to use the broad match.

One thing you have to make sure of is, you keep track on your landing pages and see what exact keywords that drive traffic to your pages.

Later you can add those long tail keyword to your campaign which eventually bring more clicks and traffic as they're well targeted.
I got extra 10-20% traffic which has better CTR from those keywords.

I use google analytics and crazyegg.com, some people also use tracking202 to track their keywords.
I like crazyegg the most, because it shows not just where the traffic come from, but also what keyword that drive traffic and how the visitor behaviour (crazy egg shows you what link people click).

Hope that help

Hendra