Matching Options

When running an Adwords campaign, you can and should define when your keywords will appear in search results. To do this, you can select matching options for each of your keywords to either reach a broad audience or target a niche.

The Google Adwords platform allows you to select four matching options:

Broad Match

Broad match is default setting for an Adwords campaign. Broad match means your ad will appear in search results when any combination of words in your keyword phrase search. Many an advertiser has learned expensive lessons using this setting. Let’s look at an example.

Assume I am selling travel writing diaries and using “travel journals” as my keyword phrase. Any time a person enters any combination of “travel” and “journals” in a search, my ad will appear. The ad will also appear for plurals and relevant variations. While this may sound great at first glance, a broad match setting can result in low quality hits and poor conversion rates. A person searching for travel journal stories is going to see my link. While a decent percentage will click my link, they are far less likely to buy because they are just browsing. Using broad match, my costs go up and my conversions go down.

2. You won't have to spend all your time marketing to gain new subscribers. Just get and keep enough subscribers to reach your monthly income goal.

3. You can figure how many subscribers it'll take to meet your income goal. Note on your ad that you'll only accept a limited number of subscribers.

4. You won't have any shipping or materials costs like offline subscription publications. You'll just have your internet access and web site expenses.

5. You can sell back end or upsell products inside a fee based subscription ezine. It could be your own products or affiliate programs you've joined.

6. You can start an affiliate program that will give people residual commission. People will want to join because it's residual instead of one time sales.