Keywords matches search terms to trigger ads
How Google actually decides which ad gets to show?
- Google ads can be described as a big auction house.
- When you set your maximum bid that means that’s the maximum amount that you are willing to pay. If your bid is too low then the competitor is going to win.
- In order for Google to know which ad it’s going to show, it's first going to be looking at all of the different available keywords from all of our different competitors.
- Then, it gathers all of the different keywords that it deems relevant to the search term. These keywords have an ad that is connected to them. It then decides which ad to show according to the maximum bid set by each advertiser. Therefore, the highest bidder gets to show their ad.
In this sense we could look at all of these keywords as items. And we are bidding for our items.
- When Google decides on what ad to be showing, it collects all of those keywords that they believe are relevant to the search term and then sees them as one big keyword that everyone is bidding for.
Match types – basically tells the Google algorithm how widely we want them to match our keyword to the different search terms.
- Broad match
- Broad match modifier
- Phrase match
- Exact match
- Negative match – you get to exclude keywords; your main form of optimization; should be done regularly
Example:
BROAD MATCH: Reusable Bags
BROAD MATCH MODIFIER: +Reusable+Bags
PHRASE MATCH: “Reusable Bags”
EXACT MATCH: [Reusable Bags]
NEGATIVE MATCH: -Reusable Bags
3-step process of handling keywords
- Keyword research — knowing where to find keywords and what type of keywords to find.
- Planning — discuss the different match types
- Organizing — learn to organize massive amounts of keywords; what kind of themes to look for