Founder of Decal Marketing & Adwords Expert
Iain Dooley Explains How to Use Adwords Campaign Types

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NOTE: Thanks to the ever-changing world of SEO and Google Adwords,
some parts of this video may not be fully updated.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hi there. My name is Iain Dooley, and today I’m going to give you the one tactic that will deliver the single biggest improvement to your Adwords campaign that you’ll ever see. But, first, we need to cover a couple of core concepts that you need to understand before you can go and do your homework assignment for today. So let’s get started.

So the first key concept that you need to understand is (within Adwords campaign types) the concept of match types, and there are three match types. There’s broad match, phrase match, and exact match. The easiest way to understand the difference is by looking at an example.

First, let’s look at broad match. Now, imagine we’re bidding on the keyword ladies shoes in our Adwords campaign using broad match. The search terms that will match our broad match ladies shoes keyword are: Women’s shoes, sling back pumps, evening shoes for women. So you can see there are lots of different things that will match a broad match keyword. And it won’t match, for instance, how to buy boat. So it will match anything even remotely related to ladies shoes, but it won’t match things that are not related to ladies shoes at all.

Now, let’s look at phrase match. If we bid in our Adwords campaign on the keyword ladies shoes, using phrase match, then that will match people searching for cheap ladies shoes, ladies shoes petite sizes, but it won’t match ladies evening shoes. So a phrase match keyword will only match search terms that contain that phrase in that order with nothing in between.

Now, let’s look at exact match. If we bid on the keyword ladies shoes in our Adwords campaign using exact match, then that will match people searching for the exact search term ladies shoes, and it won’t match anything else at all.

So broad match is really, really broad. Phrase match is much less broad, and exact match isn’t broad at all. The targeting becomes exponentially more narrow as we go from broad, to phrase, to exact.

So you might think that broad is actually the best one. You can get your ad in front of more people with less effort. The problem is this thing called quality score, which is composed almost entirely of click through rate. The higher your quality score, the cheaper your ads will be. Every time someone sees your ad and doesn’t click on it, your click through rate goes down. Also, there’s people out there who will just click on anything, even if the ad isn’t relevant to them.

So the secret to AdWords is not to get your ad in front of as many people as possible, but to get your ads in front of the right people, and Google AdWords rewards you for that by increasing your quality score, and decreasing your cost per click.

Now, if you’re wondering how to tell whether or not you’re bidding on broad match, or phrase match, or exact match, here’s what it looks like. A broad match keyword is just one or more words by itself with no other punctuation. Phrase match keyword is one or more words surrounded in double quotes, as you can see here. And an exact match keyword is one or more words surrounded by square brackets. So you can go into your campaign if you’re not too sure, look in your keywords tab, and check what type of match type you’re using in your own campaign.

Now, the second big concept that you need to be aware of in order to get the most out of AdWords is negative keywords. When you’re bidding on broad or phrase match, as you saw, your keyword can match lots and lots of different search terms, but you can tell Google to block certain search terms from being matched.

The important thing to remember about negative keywords is that match types work exactly the same in negative keywords as they do for normal keywords. So you can add a phrase match negative keyword, or an exact match negative keyword. Now, I would say that you’ll never want to use a broad match negative keyword, as you’ll be throwing out the baby with the bath water. You don’t know exactly what you’re going to blocking.

But, for example, if you sell ladies shoes, and you don’t sell petite sizes, you could add a phrase match negative keyword for petite sizes, or if you sell ladies shoes, and you notice that a lot of people are clicking through to your site, and not converting from just the search term shoes by itself, then you can add an exact match negative keyword just for the word shoes. So you don’t want to block out all queries with the word shoes in it, but the exact word shoes might be too general, and you find that people aren’t going to buy just if they type shoes.

If you don’t sell petite sizes, you just want to block out any query that has the word petite sizes in it. You might even change that to block out just the word petite as a phrase match negative keyword.

So we’ve covered the basics. Now, I’m going to take you through a screen cast showing you exactly how to complete your fifty minute task for today. Let’s take a look.

For those of you who haven’t started using AdWords at all yet, I’m going to go through a really quick campaign set up. Log into your AdWords account and click on the campaigns tab. Now, click new campaign. Choose search network only. Choose all features. Name the campaign anything you like. Choose search network only. Deselect include search partners. Choose your county and location you want to bid on. Select to manually set bids for your clicks. Put your default bid at two bucks. Put your budget at twenty bucks per day. And down at the bottom change to rotate indefinitely. Save and continue. Now call your ad group, “my first ad group,” or anything else you like. Write an ad here about what you do.

If you put a full stop, or a question mark, or any other punctuation at the end of description line one, then you’ll see that you get a longer headline when your ad is in top position. Put your domain, working software dot com dot AU, and what you do. So widgets, and in the destination URL you can just put your home page.

Now, in your keywords section, if you’ve done some keyword research you can paste the results in there. Otherwise, just put in a keyword that says what you do. Sell widgets online. Now, save that ad group.

Obviously there are a lot more things that you can do in terms of keyword research, campaign set up, and ad copy, but that was just the lightening round, “How to get your first ad running in twenty seconds” type set up. Once you’ve got a campaign set up with an ad running, all you have to do to go through this next process is run it for a few days, and get a few clicks. Once you’ve done that, or if you already had a campaign set up, then you go to the keywords tab, click details, and then under search terms, click all. And this is the search term report. Now, these are all the exact phrases that people have typed in that matched your ads. You can download those, and open them up in a spreadsheet. Now, delete all columns, except search term, impressions, and conversions.

The first step is to go through and identify your negative keywords. Anything that you would have wanted to stop from being matched, and just mark them in red. So click bank training. Now, over here create a column heading called negative keyword, and for each one of these things that you’ve marked in red, figure out what it is that you want this search blocked. For instance, here we have click bank training free for newbie with no web site. Basically, anything with click bank in it I don’t want. So I’m just going to put a phrase match negative keyword, click bank.

Now, I’m going to order in descending order by impressions. And for anything that I haven’t marked in red, I’m going to go down this list and see what might be especially valuable to my business. And here’s a great one, how does AdWords work. So I’m going to go and add an exact match ad group bidding on just that keyword. So over here I’ll add another column, exact match, and I’ll take “how does AdWords work.” I’ll copy that, and I’ll put it over here with the exact match, match type indicator.

So for each of those I’m going to go down and ad a new ad group just for that exact match keyword. So I’ll click new ad group. I’ll put the exact match keyword in there. I’ll use the exact match keyword as my headline, and I’ll put some copy in here. I’ve just got learn AdWords online in just three hours. Simple, effective, [and for beginners 00:09:06]. And then in the keyword section I’m just going to put that one keyword. So we have an ad group, with a single ad, and a single keyword, and I’ll put my default bid as two dollars, and save the ad group.

Now, I’ve been running that for a few days, and we can see that how does AdWords work has a click through rate of five point eight five, which is pretty good. Average position of three point two, so I could bump that click through rate up just by spending a little bit more money, and my average cost per click is only a dollar forty-two. So I could actually increase my bid here a little bit to bump me up a position and get some more clicks on that one.

So what are we going to do with these negative keywords? Well, what I’ll do is I’ll go back to my ad group, which had my broad match keyword in it. And now I’ll click on this ad group, and down at the bottom in the keywords tab, I can click here negative keywords, and then I can go add keywords, and I can grab all of those negative keywords that I wanted to block and paste them in. And I can, also, block the exact match keyword that I added as its own ad group, and that will stop my broad match campaign from competing with my exact match campaign. And so I’ll save that. And so as you can see now, I’m going to start milking that volume out of the broad match, and into highly targeted exact match keywords.

So that’s it. When you target your ads better using the search term report, negative keywords, and exact match ad groups, not only will you see the biggest single improvement in your campaign that you will ever see, but you make it easier to optimize your ad copy and your landing pages on an ongoing basis.

Thanks very much, and happy optimizing.