To manage your Adwords campaigns effectively you must be different than the crowd. You not only have to know when to follow what works, but more importantly, when the crowd is wrong and you should go the other way.

Ever been in a checkout lane at a supermarket, where you and 10 others were waiting their turn, only to notice a newcomer use the lane four aisles over and get immediate service? The lane was open all the time, but you got into the crowded one because everyone else was, too.

It works that way in the Adwords management game as well. Everyone is following everyone else; they are using others’ keywords, using the same ads, and even coveting equal top ad positions on the page. Now don’t get me wrong. There is much to gain by legally and ethically using your competitor’s work to take a shortcut to where you need to be, but you have to know when to follow and when not to.

Many times the most hotly contested keywords are simply not worth the price others are paying. And more times than not, I suspect, the company with the ad in the very top position is losing money on that placement. Often, people are bidding up keywords that don’t even bring conversions – these keywords are what we call “losers” – and probably aren’t worth minimum bid pricing, but since everyone else has that keyword and the price is high, then people just naturally “follow the crowd.”

There have been many studies that show that people often do something I call “clicking their way down.” In other words, they click first on the ads with the highest position, but they are prone to hitting the “back” button and clicking on lower ads until they are satisfied that they have enough information to make a purchasing decision.

Now, armed with this information, do you still want to follow the crowd and buy your way to the top ad position? Maybe!

Here are the rules I like to follow:
-Covet top ad positions for well-thought-out keywords.
-Try to rank lower for more generic keywords

In cases where the prices on keywords are artificially higher because of intense competition, I don’t really care to be in the top ad position for that keyword – ESPECIALLY if it not a targeted keyword, meaning it is too “generic.”

It does not make much sense to pay an outrageous price per click in an effort to be in the top ad position for the term “legal”, but it may make lots of sense to be in the top ad position for the term “legal real estate services in Austin”.  The latter keyword indicates that the searcher knows exactly what she wants. She has, perhaps, already performed a few searches that were not quite as targeted as this one, and has now refined her search in an effort to get more pertinent information.

So what are the instances where we SHOULD be a follower of someone’s Adwords campaign. A good example is “stealth research.” Others call it “spying.” But whatever name you call it, keyword spying is perfectly legal, ethical, and vitally important if you want to take a shortcut to profitability and learn from your competitors’ efforts and mistakes.

Keyword spying involves using a free or paid research tool that tells exactly what keywords your competitors have been using over a certain time period. You can use this research to find profitable keywords. For now, don’t worry about how these spy companies get their data, just make sure that you take advantage of one of these services so that you can benefit from your competitors prior research.

Some of the keyword spying tools that are available include Spyfu, PPC Webspy, and Keyword Spy to name a few. There are many others. The key is that you invest time to actually learn how to use all of their features and then apply those to your business.

But even when spying on your competitors, it is always good to remember that just because they are doing something, doesn’t mean it works. Use your own judgement and intuition – or hire a professional Adwords management company who already has these tools and can use them in combination with their own experience to help you successfully manage your Google Adwords campaign and stand out from the crowd.

There are a variety of things one must look for when choosing a reliable, trustworthy and professional adwords management service. Outsourcing your adwords management requires that you know these 4 key things to look for when choosing an adwords management service. Knowing what to look for will help you insure that you’re getting the best adwords management service possible and help you insure you’re getting your money’s worth of adwords management.

Split Testing-
Spilt testing is the key to decreasing click costs and the key to getting much higher ad position in Google. Many Google adwords advertisers live and swear by split testing because of the huge impact that it has on their adwords campaigns. However there are many adwords management services that simply do not offer split testing because of the amount of work it takes to set it up for clients. There are also adwords management services that offer split testing as an ad-on service, meaning that they charge you extra money for split testing your ads. This is completely backwards and just plain WRONG. If you are paying an adwords management service to manage your adwords accounts split testing should be included as a part of daily management with no additional fees. After all, it is the key to lowering your click costs and getting you higher ad placement in Google.

Campaign Optimization-
You had better insure your adwords management service does this. Campaign optimization is one of the very first things that a professional adwords management service does to your campaigns. Campaign optimization consists of organizing keywords into very closely knit, relevant adgroups.  Google absolutely hates it when you have all of your keywords stuffed into the same or a few adgroups. Organizing your adgroups properly takes much time and much skill but is a vital part of making your adwords campaigns achieve perfect relevancy.

Relevancy-
Most Adwords Management Service professionals know that relevancy is a huge part of making adwords campaigns successful, but few adwords management services stress the importance of relevancy to their clients… Why? It takes a whole lot of work to make campaigns have perfect relevancy. If your adwords management service does not insure that your adgroups, your ads and your landing page have perfect relevancy then you are not getting your money’s worth of adwords management. Google really looks for relevancy and always rewards campaigns that perfect it.

Conversion-
You can have all the traffic in the world going to your website, but if your website can not convert that traffic into sales what’s the point? The sole purpose of your website is to convert traffic into sales and leads. Sadly, it is not easy to find an adwords management service with expertise in conversion. While most adwords management services can help increase traffic though adwords not many of these services help their clients Optimize their websites so they actually convert visitors into sales. Regardless, you need to find an adwords management service that does both. Remember, conversion is the key to profitability.

Article Marketing is most definitely one of the most efficient ways of getting free traffic on the internet. Most people fail to realize that Article Marketing is extremely powerful for a great variety of reasons. It is a fact; Article Marketing is the purest and surest form of marketing on the internet today. I will reveal to you the pure power of article marketing as I show you the 4 key ways it pumps loads of free traffic to your website.

Link Backs – Higher Ranking in Search Engines
Article Marketing provides you with a valuable source of link backs (links pointing back) to your site. With each Article you send out you are allowed to have two links at the end of your article in a special section of the article called the Resource Box. As you submit articles to article directories they will begin to get picked up and posted on blogs, forums, and several relevant websites. Pretty soon you will have all of these links pointing to your website from many different web sites and directories. Search Engines will notice the links and will start ranking your website higher in the search engines.

Readers Click the Link
If your articles are well written and are able to hold a readers attention, many readers will be enticed to click on a link at the end of your article and visit your website. Interested readers mean “targeted traffic”. That’s the kind of traffic that buys… What’s the best part about it? It’s Free!

Articles Get Ranked
Many times if an article is well written it can get ranked in the search engines for specific keywords all on its own! That means that many more people may read your article which means you’ll be getting a lot more free traffic. Not to mention it really makes your business Stand Out when one of your articles are ranked in the search engines.

Business Article Marketing – Get Established as the Expert
The awesome thing about article marketing is that after posting multiple articles on a particular subject, you can quickly establish yourself as an expert in your particular field. If someone does a search on your particular area of business and run across one of your articles or find one of your articles on someone else’s website you will instantly be awarded with valuable credibility. It is proven that consumers always buy more from someone they can trust. So if you’re showing up everywhere as an established author in your niche consumers are going to be more inclined to buy from you. Why? You’re the expert. You’re the one with the answers and with all of the online recognition.

Proper management of your Google Adwords campaign will prevent your campaigns from getting what is commonly referred to in the internet marketing world as the “Google Slap.” So exactly WHAT IS the Google Slap? That’s when Google decides that you have done something that is either against their policies, quality guidelines, or against the law and they decide to “slap” you for it.

Sometimes that punishment results in your website being removed from its index and search results. Other times, it may be an “adjustment” downward for your page ranking. Here is how Google puts it in their own words:

“Google may temporarily or permanently remove sites from its index and search results if it believes it is obligated to do so by law, if the sites do not meet Google’s quality guidelines, or for other reasons, such as if the sites detract from users’ ability to locate relevant information. We cannot comment on the individual reasons a page may be removed…”
(Google Webmasters/Site Owners Help Manual)

The “Google Slap” is mostly used when referring to cases where organic listings are penalized. Organic listings are free search results that appear below and to the left of paid ads; however, make no mistake about it; you can get “slapped” for running bad Adword campaigns as well. An example of having one’s Adword campaign being slapped would be where perhaps your ads were costing $3 a click and suddenly Google raised your minimum bid to $10.

Here are some of the common mistakes people make in their Adword campaigns that result in Google slaps:
-Poorly written ads with extremely low click-through rates
-Using too many broad-matching keywords, which really have no relevancy to the terms searched on; this will also result in low click-through rates, which will get you “slapped” with higher ad prices.
-Low quality scores, where there is no relevancy between the keywords searched on, the Adword copy, and the landing page.
-Using a destination URL that is not congruent with the display URL in your ad
-Deceptive advertising; DON’T do this.

There are many other ways to get yourself slapped, but I think you may be getting the picture. Now, what you REALLY want to get from Google is what is referred to as “Google Love.”

Google loves for its searchers to find what they want; in fact, if you can figure out a way to make sure that your products or services are exactly what a searcher is looking for, Google will LOVE you. It’s really that simple. Many people try to over-complicate this.

Google loves for its searchers to be happy and they will reward you will lower-priced ads if you can consistently and effectively make this happen. Many advertisers don’t know it, but the ads at the top are not necessarily the ones who are paying the most. The Google bidding process factors in something called a “quality score,” which is the great equalizer. Quality scores assure Google that an advertiser cannot simply “buy” their way to the top position without giving the searchers value in return.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather be loved than slapped – especially when we are talking about my Google Adwords campaign. If you follow Google’s guidelines, do your market and keyword research, and spend some time learning about effective Adword campaign management techniques, I promise that you will feel lots of love…and not only that…you will find yourself with a profitable Adwords campaign.

Proper Adword campaign management includes making sure that your ads are relevant to what is being searched for. But that’s where many Adword campaign managers stop. Sure, the copy of your ad must be relevant to what is being search for, but what about the URLs (website addresses) that show at the bottom of your ad? And what about your website landing page?r

Why, you may ask, does all this matter? Maybe your company has an unlimited budget and you think you are going to buy your way to the top ad position in Google. You may say to yourself “If everyone is bidding $10 per keyword, then I am going to bid $20.” Then you wonder why you don’t get the #1 ad position or why (if you DO get the #1 ad position) it doesn’t last very long. Worse yet, what if that high ad position is making you lose money on your overall campaign. If you can’t convert enough clickers into leads or sales, then you may be in for a rude financial awakening.

If you are going to be advertise with Google Adwords over the long run, then you had better learn this fact and learn it quickly. YOU CAN’T BUY GOOGLE. No, Google can’t be “bribed” into giving you a top ad position for too long if your “offering” is not what the searchers are looking for. You see, Google has a responsibility to its searchers to serve up the most pertinent ads that relate to the keywords searched on. Google is behaving this way for selfish reasons and because of those reasons people use Google more than any other search engine in the world.

Sure, they like the fact that you have high bids, but if someone else is bidding lower than you for the same keywords, but their ads are getting more clicks AND the landing page of their website appears to be more what the searcher was looking for, then guess ens up getting top ad positions for less money than you are willing to pay?

You see, it is all about your “offering” and making your offering relevant. So what is my offering you may ask? Your “offering” is what we at Absolutely Dominate call a combination of the keywords you buy, the headline in your ad, the ad copy, the display and destination URLs, and (most importantly) your landing page. As we said earlier, most Adword Pay Per Click management companies are concerned only with the various tactics aimed at helping your ad copy match the keywords that were searched. Those kinds of tactics can only work so well.

If you are struggling with Google Adwords, perhaps you need to back up and consider an overall strategy – not just a loosely defined tactic or two, but a strategy which involves a series of well-thought-out tactics that take into account EVERYTHING you are doing…INCLUDING your website copy.

Oh, maybe your Adword management company doesn’t care about your website, but I can assure you that the searcher looking for a product cares…and because they care, Google cares also. And Google has come up with an excellent strategy to reward those who take the time to care, which translates into a lower cost per click. Do you care now that you know this knowledge may save you money?

Again, even if you have a good ad, you had better make sure your site is relevant to what the searcher is looking for. So how does Google determine the relevancy of your site? One way is the words ON your site. Let’ say you sell widgets. Someone searches in Google for “purple widgets” and your ad comes up. The searcher clicks on your site. Will they see the words “purple widgets” on the page or will they simply see the word “widgets”?

You may say that it doesn’t matter as long as you sell purple widgets somewhere on your site. Wrong! Perhaps you should send them to the purple widget page when they click on your ad and not just send them to the home page. Don’t have a whole page dedicated to purple widgets? Then there is another way using what we call “magic keyword insertion”, where the keywords the user searched for are automatically inserted onto the landing page. Sound too sophisticated? Then perhaps you need some sophisticated help. Will that cost money? Yes, but probably not as much as your are spending now in higher Google Adword costs.

Google Adwords Management involves a lot more than just setting up ads. These days, an “organic” strategy may be every bit as important as a “paid” strategy? So what do I mean by “organic”? No, I’m not talking about food that is grown in your vegetable garden without the use of pesticides or other harmful chemicals, but I AM talking about traffic that your website receives without the aid of excessive spending that could be harmful to your pocketbook.

Organic listings are the results that appear BELOW and to the left of paid ads when you search Google for a keyword term that you want more information about. For example, let’s say that I was in an accident victim and needed to contact an attorney in Georgia. I may go to Google and type in something like “attorneys in Georgia”. If I lived in Nevada and was looking for real estate or if I wanted to move to Nevada, I might type in “homes for sales in Las Vegas”.

In both cases, ads would normally show at the very top of the page and down the right-hand side in Google. Any listing or result that is not an ad is called an “organic” listing. These are the listings that Google “thinks” you may be looking for (based upon the search criteria you entered in the box).

This is actually a very simple concept. Google wants to reward you for using their search service by serving up both relevant ads and also relevant non-ads (organic listings). Google wants to keep you as a customer by making sure they are giving you what you are looking for in your search.

Now why is that important to someone using a paid service like Google Adwords? Well, it is a well-documented, but little-known fact that as many as 70% of those using Google search DON’T click on the paid ads. To put it another way, if 100 people search for a service you provide AND you show up in the paid search results, only 30 of those people will actually click on an ad.

To make matters worse, of the 30 that do click on an ad, only a percentage of those will click on YOUR ad, as you are competing with other advertisers. And even if they DO click on your ad…does that mean you are necessarily going to get a sale or lead out of the click? No!

Wouldn’t it be better if your company were listed in the organic listings as well? If you are, not only are you 2-3 times more likely to get a click, but the click that you end up getting is FREE! Hey, while you’re at it, why not achieve the best of both worlds and be both in the free (organic) and paid (Adword ads on the top and right-hand side) in the Google search results.

So how do you get ranked highly in the organic search results? It is not easy, but it is certainly doable as we have proved over and over again. But what does this have to do with my Adword campaign, though? EVERYTHING.

A good Adword campaign…at least an Adword campaign that is professionally managed includes a strategy for making sure that the “landing” page a customer ends up on (your website) is relevant to what was actually searched on. Google wants to reward the searcher with what they are actually looking for. And the better your website landing page, the better the chances that it appears in the organic listings as well.

To say it another way, Google will reward you, the Google Adwords advertiser with a lower cost per click if your landing page is relevant to what the searching is looking for…and if your website is more relevant, wouldn’t it make sense for Google to present that page in the organic (free) listings as well? The benefit is DOUBLE. Lower costs per click when they click on your ad, and lots of potential free traffic as well!

No, it’s not easy to achieve high Google rankings, but if you haven’t given improving your landing page much thought or if the company managing your pay per click Adwords campaign has not concentrated on this aspect of your business, then I’m afraid your business is suffering…not once, but twice.

Use Google’s pay-per-click Adwords even when you have decided not to use paid search advertising to market your product or service? Sounds kind of crazy but it makes perfect sense to me!

There is an old business principle: “The only way you can be certain of anything in the world of marketing is to test it first.” Make an assumption; test that assumption. Now, based on the results of that test, either keep your assumption or make a new one.

Let’s give a real-world example. Say you are a medical malpractice attorney and plan on obtaining the majority of your business using television advertising. From the commercial on T.V. you will be directing them to your website for more information.

Those of you who have advertised on television before know the costs can run into the thousands and even more. How do you know whether the website that you are sending your prospect to is going to convert for you or not? You don’t – at least not until you test.

Wouldn’t it be better to tweak your copy, the layout, etc. so that conversions and sales are maximized BEFORE you spend all that money on the commercials? Why, of course it would. But how?

Easy. Spend money on a Google Adwords campaign first so that you can drive low-cost traffic to your site and test your marketing assumptions. Google Adwords is the best marketing medium I know of to get IMMEDIATE feedback for your business.

In the above example, the legal firm could set up a complete Google Adwords campaign and be driving traffic to their site in less than 10 minutes. How quick is that!

Here’s another scenario. Let’s say that you have decided that a Google adword campaign may not be an efficient way to make money with your product. Maybe you have tried it before, but found that your cost per click was prohibitive and that there just wasn’t enough profit to be made in order to justify the overall costs associated with setting up and running the Adword campaign.

So instead, you have decided to focus all of your efforts on free search marketing. In other words, you want to have your website show up in the organic (or free listings) on the first page of Google when customers search for keywords relating to your product or service. That is all fine and good, but the real question becomes, which keywords to you optimize your website for?

In other words, what words or terms are you going to use throughout your site so that Google knows what your site is about and they can rank your site ahead of your competitors. But the MAJOR question is which keywords actually CONVERT. After all, wouldn’t it be foolhardy to spend all of that money on SEO (search engine optimization) only to find out that those particular keywords aren’t going to bring “paying customers” to your site?

Well, a lightning-quick way to find out which keywords lead to conversions is to (surprise) set up a Google Adwords pay-per-click campaign. Next, carefully track which keywords bring visitors to your website and (more importantly) which keywords lead to sales. Now, instead of wasting perhaps months of precious time, you can know in a few days how you need to optimize your site.

When you are done testing, you can shut down your campaign and begin using free search traffic to sell your products. But wouldn’t it be better to have the best of both worlds? Why not direct traffic to your site using both paid and free advertising. In the above example, we assumed that the former Google Adwords campaign was not profitable because the bidding on specific keywords was too high. Perhaps it was too high because you didn’t know what you were doing.

Many times we have found that the folks in the top 3 ad positions in Google Adwords are paying LESS (sometimes far less) than those in the bottom positions. There are many reasons this is so and there is not enough space here to go into the details, but unless you are willing to invest a sufficient amount of time and money in the tools you need to play the Google Adwords game, then perhaps you need to consider a professional Google Adwords campaign management company who can play the game for you so that you can spend all your energy on making those sales when the traffic comes.

Whether you are new to Google Adwords or you are a seasoned pro that manages multiple pay-per-click or pay-per-impression Adword campaigns, there is one fact you must embrace in order to face reality and keep your sanity…MOST clicks will result in failure!

Even if your website has a 20% conversion rate (and depending on how you define “conversion” and the industry that you’re in a 20% conversion may be phenomenal) that means you are still failing with 80% of the prospects those clicks bring to your site.

So if you have 10 clicks and fail with 8 of them, but can find a way to make that scenario profitable, then the only thing you need is MORE failure!

Another way to say it is that you need more clicks. Instead of 10 clicks why not 1,000 or even 10,000 if the 10 clicks worked? That’s what we call “ramping up” a campaign.

The problem is that many Adwords campaigns fail because they fail big first. Instead of testing the water with their big toe first, they jump right into the deep end and many end up diving in head first without so much as testing the depth of the water (so to speak). Fast failure that you can’t make profitable will burn through a budget and give the advertiser a bad taste of what could have worked out to be a tremendously profitable venture into the rewards of Adwords marketing and sometimes only a small tweak is what you needed to make an Adwords campaign successful.

Yes, you are going to fail most of the time, but let’s find out a way that we can make that failure as profitable as possible. In order to succeed with Google Adwords or any other search marketing campaigns there are some basic skills that you are gong to have to have. These skills include:

– How to do proper keyword research

– How to properly organize and format those keywords once you find them (This is a skill that even the best Adword campaign managers lack.)

– How to write ad copy will that entice clicks

– How to write ad copy that encourages conversions (Again a skill that most pros have failed to master.)

– Recognizing Which keyword terms are priced too high and you need to avoid

-Where you want to rank on a page (Hint: Depending on your market, it may not always be the 1-3 adword positions!)

How to outsmart your competition on bidding
Before you learn to master these skills you should not begin your Google Adwords campaign with a huge daily budget, neither should you bid exorbitant amounts on keywords that may put you out of business. Many times we find that the keywords that everyone is bidding so high on don’t convert well anyway!

For example, let’s say the keyword “attorney” is going for $8 a click. Let’s think for a second, do you really want to bid on that keyword? Unless you know what you are doing with that search term, then your ad may show in the following instances:

-When someone needs an attorney (Good)
-When a college kid is doing a research paper on attorneys. (Bad)
-When someone types in “free attorney” (Very Bad)

Wouldn’t it make more sense to spend your money on a keywords such as “accident attorney in Georgia” (if that is where you practiced)?

The bottom line is that you will fail more in Google Adwords than you will succeed, but if you can figure a way to make even the small failures profitable, then it may be time to ramp up your campaign in a big way.

Sometimes you may be “in over your head” or perhaps you don’t have anyone in your organization that has the time to manage your Adwords or other search marketing campaigns efficiently. That’s when you need to seek the advice of a PPC or Adwords Management expert so that they can help you fail “profitably”.

A good Adword campaign starts with a good headline. A great Adword campaign starts with a great headline. And knowing how to write great headlines is a very valuable skill in any business. The failure to understand how critical this skill can be is a huge mistake that we see from both Adwords newbies and professional Adwords management companies.

Good keyword research and bidding skills may get your ad shown in a top ad position when someone does a search, but if you don’t have a compelling headline, you may be wasting a lot of money. On the other hand, you can have poor ad placement, ranking near the bottom of the page, but if your headline sticks out, then you will end up “stealing” clicks from your higher-ranking competitors.

So if you don’t know how to write good headlines, where can you start? Start by looking at some of the ads that appear when you search for your keywords in Google. Now, if you are a student of mine, you already know my philosophy about the top ad position. Hint: “The top ad position is not always the place you want to be, and the company advertising there, does not necessarily know what they are doing.” But there ARE instances when the top ads will have the best headlines. Look at those ads and pay attention.

Another method that I like is to use a research tool, such as Spyfu or Keyword Spy to see which ads of a competitor have consistently been in positions #4-6. Many times you will find that your competitor affords to rank lower because they have strong headlines that out-convert higher-ranking ads. Read those headlines and learn from them as well.

Also, it may be beneficial to look OUTSIDE of your industry for Adword headline ideas. How about a real (at the time of this writing) live example?

Let’s say I am writing an ad for an attorney and need an inspiring headline. I will now search for a babysitter to get ideas. So I just typed “need a babysitter” into Google and here is an incredible idea from an ad whose headline is: “Need a Local Babysitter?” I love the word “local”. I can now use the headline “Need a Local Attorney?” or write another headline that includes the word “local”. At the time of this writing, a quick search on “need an attorney” showed no ads on the first page using the word “local.” My ad would definitely stand out!

You may be wondering, “Can I steal headlines? Is that plagiarism?” There is no rule that says you cannot use the same headline your competitor is using. But you must remember, 99% of the time the advertiser is doing SOMETHING wrong. So if you are going to copy a competitor, I suggest you copy only what works. Sure, I like to look at competitors’ ads and take notes. I even recommend starting a digital “swipe” file, where you take headlines that you really like and copy them to a document and keep adding to that file for future reference.

There are many free resources on the web that can train you to write good headlines and we will cover some great headline-writing techniques in a later article, but the most important thing is that you recognize your return for investing time into learning how to write a great headline. If you can’t afford to invest your time, then hire a copywriter who knows how to write headlines and ad copy for search marketing ads. Many Adwords management companies also have specialists who are experts in writing headlines and ad copy that can turn otherwise so-so advertising into highly successful Google Adwords campaigns.

Perhaps the most common mistake we see when we talk to our clients about managing their Google Adword campaign is the misuse of Google’s broad match option. This mistake is not only limited to newbies, but to professionals as well and could be costing your company thousands of dollars a month, depending on your ad spend, of course. In any case, whether your budget is $150 or $15,000 a month you need to pay close attention…

Let’s explain what broad match is by explaining ALL the different levels of ad control in the Google Adword program. There are actually three – they are broad match, phrase match, and exact match. When you “buy” a keyword you get to tell Google whether you want your ad to display, based on HOW that keyword is typed in.

If you choose broad word matching, you are saying that you want your ad to appear in ANY search that has that keyword in it – no matter how or where that keyword appears in the search box. For instance, if your keyword is “shoes”. Your ad will display when someone searched on “buy shoes”, “tennis shoes”, or even “horse shoes”. Of course, this is a good example where you would be losing money for broad searches on “horse shoes” if you did not cater to horses.

Phrase matching is where you choose a keyword phrase (more than one word) but tell Google that you want to show your ad only when the user types in that keyword phrase in the SAME ORDER that you listed them. For example, if you chose phrase matching for “tennis shoes” your ad will only show when the user types those two words in the same order. If someone types in “green tennis shoes” your ad will show. But if they type in “shoes for tennis” your ad will NOT show because the order of the words did not match the phrase that you specified.

Exact matching is where you tell Google that you only want your ad to show when the words match (surprise) EXACTLY. If we use the example above, but reserve “tennis shoes” as an exact match, then if a user types in “green tennis shoes” your ad will not show because it did not match exactly. They must type in “tennis shoes” in that order and nothing else for your ad to show. Even if they type in “shoes tennis” your ad will not show because the searcher typed them in the wrong order.

So why would anyone bother to use phrase matching or exact matching if these methods of ad control don’t always show your ads? Very simple. In many cases, testing shows that certain phrase matches and exact matches convert much higher than broad matches using the same keywords.

But why would you use broad matching at all? We use broad matching in certain cases where we are researching a market and trying to find which keywords actually work. Sometimes you have to be willing to spend a little money upfront in order to complete your research. In some cases, broad matching can work well if you know how to use “negative” keywords effectively, which is another subject entirely.

After all, you won’t know which keywords are converting unless you test many forms and variations, right? The problem is that most newbies and many pros start off with broad matching keywords and then they fail to analyze their results and make necessary alterations where low-converting broad keywords are deleted and high-converting keywords are used to find other high-converting broad keywords. Many times the campaigns are so unprofitable that they user is forced out of the Adwords business before they know what happened.

Of course, you can save a lot of money by using the research of your competitors and legally spying on them using stealth software that analyzes the keywords that your competitors used over a period of time. Even so, we don’t always 100% rely on a competitors research as we find 95% of the Google Adwords users are doing it all wrong to start with.

We still spy, but we do our own testing as well…and you should too. The bottom line is that you want to use broad matching, but know what you are doing when you are using this form of ad control, and by all means regularly monitor, test, and analyze your results. If you don’t have time to do this, then hire a professional Adwords management company.