Paid Search: Match Type Strategies For All The Search Engines
Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today we’re talking about “Match Typing.” Match typing is a further segmentation. Believe it or not, a keyword is not the end all be all. There are different ways to split it up.
The three common match types on both Google and MSN are “broad,” “phrase,” and “exact” match types. “Broad” means that if you advertise on a keyword like “photo” it will show up for stuff like “photo umbrellas,” “blue photo” “red photo” and “photo of a girl.” Then you have “phrase matching. Phrase matching is denoted with double quotes. So if you have “photo umbrella” what it’s looking for is the phrase “photo umbrella” anywhere contiguously in the search. You might show up for a key term like “The little girl carried a photo umbrella” and that would be awesome. You wouldn’t show up for just “photo” and you certainly wouldn’t show up for “black umbrella.” The third type is an “exact match” and is denoted with brackets around it. This says show me only when someone searches for “photo umbrella” and nothing else. Not “red photo umbrella” not “blue photo umbrella” and not “umbrella photo” only “photo umbrella” exactly.
On Google you can choose which of these you’d like to show up on. You can do the same on MSN as well. On Google what you should actually do is that it allows you to put in a destination URL in for each match type for each particular keyword. What that allows you to do is actually optimize not just on the keyword level, but on the match type level. You can get tremendous efficiency out of this. So, if you’re only advertising on one match type, what I encourage you to try is to go out and advertise on all three match types, track them separately, and bid each to its wherewithal to provide conversion to your site. Ok, that’s Google. Now let’s talk about Yahoo.
Yahoo’s match types are “Standard” and “Advanced.” You can think of it as advanced is sort of like broad, and standard is sort of like exact. On Yahoo, you have to pick either one or the other. I start off with “standard” matches and if the keyword is performing pretty well for me, then I’ll flip that keyword onto “advanced” match. Now let’s move on to MSN.
On MSN again you have “broad” “phrase” and “exact.” Here on MSN you don’t have the ability to split out the traffic and segment it further. You can bid on one of them for a particular keyword, but you only get one destination URL for that keyword. So it’s not destination URL at the match type. It’s destination URL at the keyword. So what I generally do is turn on all three match types and put the destination URL in there. Then you’re copasetic.
I hope that helps you out. Again my name is Charles Lumpkin. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com Thank you.
