Each time someone executes a search, they’re asking a question.

They search because they want to learn about something. Or find out where something is. Or discover who has it or knows about it.

They may just be curious, or the question may have been provoked by some urgent problem.

The question could be simple or complex and the searcher might be sophisticated or incredibly naive.

Search Engines answer questions. That’s pretty much all they do.

Search results offer an ordered list of answers to the question the search engine thinks you’re asking.

Paid search advertising is your chance to raise your hand and let the searcher know that you think you have the answer to their question too.

In the next post we’ll discuss what it means to the organization of your campaigns to think of yourself as a professional answer provider.

This post is part of a series on High Resolution PPC, a framework for understanding and managing paid search advertising.

Target, Value, Satisfy, Understand. That’s the mantra of High Resolution PPC.

The idea is to stop thinking about mechanical components like keywords and bids, and instead focus on a logical marketing progression.

We want the tools to support our work process instead of having to build a work process that serves the tools.

The First Step is Targeting

Targeting means showing your ads to the right people. Paid search ads are delivered as answers to questions. People type in a search query and you pay for the privilege of having your ad be one potential answer to that question.

So you must know:

• What questions do you want to answer?
• What answers do you plan on giving to those questions.

Campaigns, Ad-Groups, and Keywords are your targeting tools.

Keep in mind that they’re called ad-groups, not keyword-groups. The goal is to segregate keywords, controlled using the match-type option, so that all the queries attracted by a single ad-group are questions answered by the text-ads in the ad-group.

In other words, you want every searcher to see a a text-ad that is directly relevant to their search. To do that, you must organize your ad-groups around the search queries they attract, not the keywords they contain. Every search query that causes your text ads to be displayed, should be highly relevant to the text ad that is displayed.

Let’s illustrate with an example.

Supposed you knew that all of the following search queries would be coming into your account, and you could hand match them to appropriate text-ads before the results page was delivered to the searcher.

• Discount Dyson Vacuum
• Dyson Vacuum Features
• Dyson Vacuum Coupons
• Compare Dyson Vacuums
• Cheap Dyson Vacuum
• Dyson Extra Cyclone

Wouldn’t you want the 3 price-related queries to get a price focused text ad, and the three feature related queries to get a feature-related text ad? Doesn’t it make sense that this would produce the highest click-through-rates and the highest ROI?

Yes, of course.

This is why you have to think about queries not just keywords, and use ad-groups to target the groups of people you want to talk to.

The Second Step is Valuing

Once we’ve targeted the right people using different ad-groups, we can then look inside the ad-group and take advantage of the fact that we don’t have to place the same value on everyone in that group.

Match-Types, Negative Keywords, and Bids are some the core valuing tools.

Extending our previous example, suppose experience tells us that people who search for ‘Cheap Dyson Vacuum’ just don’t buy from us (we’re not that cheap). That has no value, so we add ‘cheap’ or ‘cheap dyson vacuum’ as a negative. But ‘Dyson Extra Cyclone’ is a very specific feature so people who search on that are far into the buying process, we see that query frequently with a high conversion rate. Make that an exact match and bid it up.

You get the idea. By correctly using these tools, watching our search queries and continually refining our campaigns, we can group queries within an ad-group, value them appropriately, and manage both budgets and returns.

The Third Step is Satisfying

People decide how well our paid search advertising does. They decide how to formulate queries which trigger our ads (or not) and they click (or don’t) and buy (or not).

Text-Ads, Landing Pages, and ultimately your offers, website, and checkout process are your satisfaction tools.

When we’re targeting accurately, and valuing properly, we have the ability to focus on satisfying those who see our ads and visit our site. Trying to do so before we’ve completed these steps means, by definition, that we’ve got too wide a range of people coming to really have a fair shot at measuring the results of any attempts at improvement.

There is little doubt that text-ad writing, let alone testing, is the paid search option that gets the least attention and effort as compared to its importance and potential impact. Rewriting a text ad and doubling performance - in terms of CTR which even if it does not improve conversion rate can proportionally increase revenue - is common. We’ve seen many ad re-writes produce 10x-20x CTR improvements. Try that with a better bid.

But writing is hard. Writing is subjective. Writing takes quite a lot of time. None of these make it less important.

All the same is true-er for landing pages, website experiences, and shopping carts. This all very hard, time consuming, and costly work. But it is ultimately directly responsible for the success or lack thereof of paid search campaigns. Even within whatever limitations exist, it should be considered, managed, and measured.

The Final Step is Understanding

Even in this greatly summarized view of the paid search process, there are a lot of moving parts. Each exists by the hundreds, thousands, or hundreds-of-thousands in typical campaigns. They occur tens-of-thousands of times every day as impression and click counts increment. And we have weeks and months of history for all of this to consider and trend.

Paid search can only be managed effectively if you can learn from this data - look into it and find information.

Website and Search Analytics are your tools for understanding.

This means knowing which metrics are important. And when trends are really trends. And how all the numbers affect each other.

It also means that you need the ability to get at the data that can inform you, and easily produce the reports and dashboards that will do so for both you and your colleages or managers.

The key is continuous improvement. Paid search campaigns are never perfect. And they exist in highly dynamic environments. Only through hard work to understand the campaign and know the best move to make next to improve it can you really drive great results.

Summary

The shift into the T-V-S-U mindset is a big one. It changes the process of managing paid search and the way you think about and use the options and tools the search engines provide. More importantly, it aligns your search and marketing goals, and makes it easier to prioritize your PPC efforts and measure your results along the way.

In future posts we’ll dig into each stage and step of this process in more detail. Have questions before then? I’d love to hear them, or your comments.

This post is part of a series on High Resolution PPC, a framework for understanding and managing paid search advertising.

Since the dawn of time, paid search has been conceived of and managed based on four key components and common perceptions of their roles:

1. Keywords. Keywords define when your ads run. Choose keywords and phrases that people looking for your product or service would use.
2. Bids. Bids define how much you’re willing to pay when your ad appears for any particular keyword. Higher bids can help position your ads higher on the page and appear more frequently.
3. Text-Ads. Text-ads give you a headline and two lines of copy to attract and persuade searches to click and view your website.
4. Click/Conversion Reports. Basic reporting tells you how each keyword is doing, both individually and within campaigns, and ad-groups, in terms of clicks, conversion rates, and ROAS.

These four items remain important aspects of paid search today, but they’re not the most important variables, nor the best way to think about PPC.

We’re not operating in the same technical, competitive, or business environment as four or five years ago:

• In a world where changing definitions for match-type determine which queries cause your ads to run, worrying solely about keywords is inadequate.
• In a world where quality score has such a huge impact on where your ads run and how much you pay for them, worrying largely about bids is inadequate.
• In a world where a majority of your buyers visit your site multiple times before purchasing, text-ads remain important but must be considered in context of all user touchpoints.
• In a world where profitability is the real goal, then measuring intermediate metrics while ignoring the one that really matters - ROI - is illogical.

We’ve got a name for this old ‘keywords & bids’ view of the paid search world: ‘Low Resolution PPC’.

It was fine five or six years ago when the engines were simpler and the budgets smaller. It’s not fine anymore.

• Today you have to think about your user targeting based on the interaction of keywords, match types, and search queries.
• Today you have to think about your costs based on how quality scores and bids interact with match type keyword traps and negative keywords.
• Today you have to think about persuasion and conversion as a chain of events that starts with your text ad and continues through your landing page, your site, and the experience users have in your shopping cart.
• Today you have to think about analytics as a way to understand all of these variables and more.

It’s a high-def world, even in paid search marketing.

Introducing High Resolution PPC
But there’s more to High Resolution PPC than just a deeper consideration of the core mechanics of paid search.

We also want to shift the focus away from the mechanics of running paid ads and onto our relationship with the people to whom we’re advertising and how we manage that relationship.

We want to know who the people are conducting these searches, clarify why we want to talk to them, understand what will get their attention, and make sure to learn from our interactions with them so we can perform better in the future.

The Cornerstones of High Resolution PPC
In High Resolution PPC we manage our campaigns by using the options and controls in paid search to move clients through the marketing acquisition cycle.

Accordingly, we no longer think of search in terms of the four old cornerstones of paid search - keywords, bids, text ads, and operating reports - but instead in terms of the four stages of customer acquisition and management:

1. Target - To begin you define the focus of your efforts, using campaigns, ad-groups, and keywords to target specific groups of people who are asking the kinds of questions you want to answer with your paid search ads.
2. Value - Next you refine this focus within your target groups, using bids and match types and keyword negatives to properly value the different people who you want to attract to your website or landing pages.
3. Satisfy - With clearly targeted and properly valued searchers identified, the goal becomes delivering text ads, landing pages, and offers which satisfy user desires and advance them toward and through conversion.
4. Understand - Throughout this process we capture, analyze, and present meaningful and actionable information about each specific phase and the overall. Here you’ll apply improved reporting standards and metrics.

Each of these corresponds to specific tasks in the management of your paid search campaign, certain options that control your campaigns, and reports that provide metrics which guide the way or measure progress. (Watch future posts for details.)

Why the Change
The driving factor in moving to a High Resolution PPC approach is a desire for better returns on our investment of both time and money.

As with any other investment, we control risk by increasing the depth of our visibility and understanding, and then manipulating the options we have at our disposal.

With a High Resolution PPC approach, you regain control over your paid search campaigns, both in terms of having vastly better visibility into what is happening but also by understanding why specific results occur and how you can fix or improve them.

Next Time
In the next post on High Resolution PPC, I’ll dive a level or two deeper on the target-value-satisfy-understand process. This mental shift is the cornerstone, and once you start thinking about this logical flow in your paid search marketing, it becomes a lot easier to use the options in the engines more strategically.

{If you’re at shop.org in Las Vegas this week, stop by and say hello - we’re in Booth 115.}

Two years ago we took a deep soul-searching look at paid search management practices and technology and decided both were inadequate.

Since then we’ve developed completely new management practices and technology, and it’s time to roll them both out publicly.

The management practices are built around a framework called ‘High Resolution PPC‘. It’s based on the idea that there are three distinct stages in the paid search process and specific steps and checks to sequentially create a well formed and effective campaign.

The technology is our ClickEquations platform, and was developed based on the idea that paid search is not as efficient and effective as it could be because the software tools we have had are inadequate in a number of very specific ways.

Background
We’ve been professionally managing paid search accounts for about five years. As the market and engine platforms have developed, the size and complexity of the accounts managed has grown. Working with both venture-backed startups and Fortune 100 companies we live with high expectations, competitive sensitivities, and serious budget and ROI oversight.

While it’s been exciting to go along for the ride as the market exploded and the technology evolved, anyone who’s lived deeply in paid search management over the past years knows the day-to-day hasn’t been exactly a picnic.

It’s a lot closer to a horror show.

The search engines are opaque (to put it kindly) on multiple layers. If you try to actually figure out what’s happening and why, you find key information is missing, available information is contradictory, and things aren’t exactly consistent. The Matching Algorithms used by the Search Engines and their rules change constantly.

The image of easy-management and easy-money that caught the media’s attention in the early years is ingrained in the imaginations of VPs of Marketing, Merchandising Managers, and even some Directors of eCommerce. Which means they have expectations and make requests that make the PPC Manager’s head spin - on a daily basis.

But most importantly, the amount of change that the industry has gone through over these short, jam-packed years has not been kept up with by either the ‘best practices’ or the ‘delivered technology’.

Paid search management is a young profession, one in which everyone has been learning on the job, sharing info via the web, and attending  those endless conferences, but past a very small number of truly universal tactics there is no agreed upon ‘right way’ to organize and manage paid search, in even the most general sense.

That’s no way to spend $9 Billion or $10 Billion.

And the software tools haven’t fared will in this rapid-change environment either. The engines built interfaces that primarily serve their own needs. Instead of thinking about how paid search managers actually should and do work, and building tools to facilitate this effort, the tools are organized around the needs of the engines and their algorithms.

This leaves search managers often facing screens with 5 open applications, each which has one piece of the data or one tool they want, none designed for the whole job. In this environment work flow requires on a lot of application and context switching, cutting and pasting, and mental contortions supported by the acceptance of silly limitations and obvious inaccuracies.

We think it’s time for both the process and technology of PPC to catch up with the market realities and demands.

Introducing High Resolution PPC & ClickEquations
In the next few posts I’ll formally introduce both High Resolution PPC and ClickEquations.

High Resolution PPC starts with three primary goals - targeting the right prospects, assigning an accurate value to each, and then satisfying them. It provides the context for using the available paid search controls and options with clear ways to measure results and priorize work.

ClickEquations was and is being developed with three primary goals as well - delivering clear and accurate data, helping to prioritize opportunities and tasks, and automating as many PPC process steps as possible.

We’re excited to share the results of the last few years of work, and are eager to get your feedback.

After the upcoming introductory posts, I’ll deep dive into the specific components of each over the coming weeks and months.

What one piece of advice would I give to help improve a paid search campaign?

That was a question asked of our panel as SES in San Jose last week.

My answer: Make sure your brand keywords are fully segregated from all others.

Brand keywords - any keyword with your company name or variations in them - have completely different cost and performance characteristics than category or other other generic or product specific keywords.

These differences completely confuse the reporting for any campaigns and Ad-Groups if they’re co-mingled.

Separating Keywords and Queries
The first step is easy - every keyword you buy, regardless of its Match Type, should be in an Ad-Group if not a Campaign with only other keywords that contain the Brand name too.

Preferably, the brand terms are bucketed, with the ‘Pure’ Brand keywords in one group (those that represent just the name and variations itself), the navigational versions in another (www.brand.com, brand homepage, etc.) and the Brand-Plus keywords (Brand Sweatpants, Brand Coupons, etc.) in yet another, and so on.

In these brand focused Ad-Groups, you have to use Broad and Advanced match very sparingly and carefully, and eventually almost entirely eliminate them. If you leave them, you’ll get too many non-brand queries matching and diluting the intent of these highly focused Ad-Groups.

The other side of this Broad/Advanced Match coin is that you’ll also want to add your brand as a negative in all the remaining non-branded Campaigns and Ad-Groups. Otherwise the engines will match brand-inclusive queries against your non-brand targeted keywords.

This can be and feel dangerous, if you’re not completely sure that your Brand campaigns are complete, bid properly, running the full range of Match-Types (with of course the Match Type Keyword Traps fully configured and loaded.)

It’s probably a good idea to skip this step of adding the brand as negatives in the non-branded campaigns for a few days to ensure that there aren’t certain query formulations that your new Brand targeted Campaigns are missing.

Watch the query reports carefully, and add variations to the brand campaigns, and ultimately more negatives to both the brand the non-brand campaigns.

The Payoff
Immediately upon starting this process, especially if your campaigns had brand terms and lots of broad match scattered throughout, you’ll see radical shifts in your search reports.

• You may be amazed how much revenue is coming from and and how little cost is going into your pure brand campaigns. That’s the good news.
• You may be shocked at how much money and how little revenue is coming from your now-strictly-non-brand ad-groups. That’s the bad news. Or the opportunity, depending on how you look at it.

In any case, you’ll have a new level of clarity about the performance and activity in your PPC campaigns.

Coming Up
I’ll share more thoughts on the execution of full brand segregation, and the implications of the changes it makes to your reported results, in future posts. This is another one that may take 3-4 posts to just scratch the surface of.

In the meantime, questions and comments are encouraged. Are your brand terms separated into ad-groups? Does that help you better understand the way your PPC budgets are spent? What problems have you seen trying to control brand via Match Types? Any other ideas?

Paid Search Managers spend a lot of time analyzing clicks.

Which keywords got them? Did they convert? How much did they cost?

But how much time is spent thinking about the clicks you didn’t get? How much information do you have about those clicks anyway?

Earlier in this series I’ve discussed the idea that paid search marketers have a tough time getting a full and clear picture of what’s really going on in their accounts with the information currently provided by the engines, analytics programs, and PPC tools.

The last few posts discussed the lack of search query details as one example. Gaining insight into missing clicks is another.

Two Ways To Lose

There are two types of clicks you didn’t get. The first are those reflected in your click-through-rate; clicks that didn’t happen when your ad was shown. The count of these can be easily seen by comparing your impression count with the click count for any keyword.

The second type of missed click are those where the query was relevant (or interesting) to you but your ad wasn’t displayed. As Steve Forbert once said: (although I don’t think he was the first) you cannot win if you do not play.

Tracking Missed Impressions

Google has provided a series of Impression Share Metrics for over a year now, which provide important insights into the click missed because ad weren’t even displayed.

• Impression Share (IS): The percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting. This metric is available at the campaign and account level for search.
• Impression Share Exact Match. Impression Share Exact Match reports the impression share of your campaigns as if your keywords were set to ExactMatch.
• Lost IS. Your impression share + Lost IS (Budget) + Lost IS (Rank) = 100%.
• Lost IS (Rank): The percentage of impressions lost due to low Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score).
• Lost IS (Budget): The percentage of impressions lost due to budget constraints.

These are informative and critical reports. You should always know the IS numbers for your campaigns. There are times you can accept a low Impression Share, and times when you cannot.

It’s too bad it takes a trip into the reporting environment (or setting up an email report) to get them rather than having them ‘in line’ with other reporting metrics.

More importantly, this data is only available at the Campaign level, and we could really use it at the Ad-Group level. When you have a large campaign with many Ad-Groups is very possible that some have great Impression Share and a few have lousy Impression Share (or that the reasons why the number is what it is differ between Ad-Groups) and the Campaign-level roll up is of limited use.

In a future post we’ll dig deeper into the meaning and applications of these numbers.

Tracking Missed Clicks

There is less information, ironically, delivered about the clicks you miss when your ads do appear.

There are many reasons people don’t click (see this post for a good list). Many could not be translated into paid search metrics without qualitative research. But there more information that could be shared about these lost clicks.

For example, average click-through rates and various positions are known, both in absolute and relative terms. Given your position of your ads, how many more or less clicks occurred than should have been expected at that position?

And exactly how many clicks would each higher position garner, or lower position lose? This could be predicted with some degree of accuracy.

Since text-ads have their own click-through-rates, which have a massive effect on the CTR’s of keywords, another option is to look at which text-ads were displayed and calculate the number of clicks a keyword would have received if the best of them (CTR-wise) had run all the time.

So with a little work doing some calculations around the position and text-ad running for a keyword, we could start to know what our potential keyword CTR could be, if we just improved our position performance and text-ad copy.

Not Perfectly Clear

Paid search is the pursuit of clicks. The right clicks at the right price.

A clear picture of a paid search campaign would therefore tell us a lot about the clicks we got, and the clicks we didn’t get. Google’s Impression Share is a great start – it delivers actionable information and with the sub-metrics starts to break the main one apart so we can see how different factors are contributing to the remaining click opportunity.

Impression share needs to go mainstream – into the normal dynamic Adwords reports and the API.

And a comparable level of visibility should be given to the clicks we get and don’t get once our ad has been displayed.

• How much better could our CTR have been?
• How many clicks were missed because we under-performed our position?
• How many more were available at higher positions?
• How many were missed because text-ads were under-performing? (Within the text-ad itself, was it the headline or target URL that dragged us down?).
• Was there a specific competitor who took more share from us than another, over time?

These are just some of the things we should be able to know about our clicks.

Yesterday I noted that paid search managers face three challenges in trying to effectively manage paid search campaigns:

• A lack of clarity (reporting problems)
• Difficulty defining priorities (strategic and planning problems)
• Horrible inefficiencies (mechanical and processes problems)

I believe that these problems need to be solved in order to improve paid search management, both the profession and the results.

First you need to see what’s happening, then you’ll want to decide what needs to be done, and then you can hopefully get it done with a reasonable amount of effort.

That doesn’t sound like too much to ask.

But 4-5-6 years into explosive growth in paid search and we’re hardly out of the starting gate. Today I’ll expand on the issues regarding reporting and clarity, and in future posts dive more deeply into the problems of setting priorities and executing paid search tasks.

What Paid Search Reports Don’t Tell You

Paid search is about answering questions. People type queries and search engines return results, which are lists of possible answers to the questions they believe are being posed. I want to structure my campaigns as tightly as possible around those search queries.

Every search engine tells you how many impressions your ads had, and how many clicks you got. They have to I suppose, since the CPC is what drives your billing. What I really want to know is what did I miss? And why? Then I can set goals and define strategies or tactics (or at least design tests) to do better.

Each conversion hopefully generates more revenue than it cost to cause that conversion, which is reflected in the rather innane ROAS metric. Being impressed with a good ROAS seems akin to believing you’ve saved money by buying something you didn’t want when it was on sale. Goods or services have costs (COGS) and the only metric that matters is ROI taking account (at least) both direct-marketing and goods/services expenses.

When my clicks do generate revenues, I’d like to know which ones. Then I can make wise decisions about future investment and effort around certain keywords and queries.

Unreasonable Demands?

So I’d like to know which search queries generated which results, how many clicks I didn’t get and why, the actual amount of profit made on each transaction (and from each keyword, query, and click).

Do any of these sound unreasonable? Far-fetched? Demanding?

Yet these desires are not generally or specifically fulfilled through the paid search reporting capabilities provided by the search engines, popular web analytics software, or even specialized PPC management tools.

Surprised? The devil is certainly in the details, and some of the information defined is available in some packages/places, but generally with huge compromises and limitations that disqualifies or invalidates them as actual or sufficient information.

Really? Yes to the best of my knowledge, as the next post will review in somewhat excruciating detail. I’m happy to learn new facts or discuss this further in the comments - significant corrections will be appended to that post.

User search queries, accurate revenue & expense allocation and matching, and ROI reporting are just three of the ways that the current generation of PPC reporting generally fail paid search advertisers and managers.

The fact that these problems/limitations are seemingly not well known, frequently discussed, and therefore clammored for as improvements is one of the things that has to change to move the business/market forward.

Managing paid search campaigns is hard.

But why?

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three primary reasons why it’s so hard to manage paid search campaigns efficiently and effectively:

1. There is a lack of clarity. It is amazingly difficult to get accurate and complete data on campaign performance and results. Much of the data you need to see is scattered across three to five different tools and interfaces. Other data is presented in formats or based on calculations that just aren’t right. (they’re wrong.) Still other information is seemingly unavailable. There is no quick and accurate way to get reports which are satisfying.
2. It’s tough to assign priority to possible actions. This is directly related to the clarity problem in many ways, but given the size of today’s campaigns, and the information provided by both the engines and even with leading analytics and paid search tools, it’s hard to know what is the most important next step to take. There are so many choices and the functional and mathematical basis for clearly making these decisions are just not available.
3. Actual paid search management is horribly inefficient. A huge number of the things one needs to do to manage campaigns are dreadfully difficult to accomplish. Many involve potential campaign reorganizations. Some depend on keyword expansion or match type filtering. Others require bid modifications or target landing page testing. Almost all are about 100x harder to accomplish at the scale they need to be done than I wish they were or anyone has time to complete.

These three issues – clarity, priority, and efficiency – are holding back the paid search industry. Perhaps not in terms of pure industry spend - because fear is still driving a lot of rather uninformed dollars into the game - but certainly success and returns from the advertisers point of view are suffering greatly.

While I don’t think they’ve been identified or considered in quite this way, the overall feeling of being ‘out of control’ or ‘without control’ pervades the comments I’ve received in recent discussions with both practitioners and executives responsible for paid search.

When was the last time a search marketer told you how in-control of their campaigns they felt? How sure they were that both expenses and revenues were where they should be?

Does anyone feel this way?

Over the next few posts I’ll dive deeper into each of these problems, attempting to clarify the issues and try to start identifying solutions.

There’s always a lot of talk about the ‘future of search’ but it usually focuses on the searchers or the search engines. I’d like to try and think about it relative to the future of search managers and search management tools.

In several earlier posts in this series I’ve discussed the how’s and why’s of buying the same or similar terms at the same time with different Match Type settings.

I outlined in one post the details of creating a Match Type Keyword Trap to filter certain search queries into specific match types. Buying multiple terms and multiple levels - when done correctly - has the ability to give you control over which queries are caught at which price.

Exact-Phrase-Broad

One reason this works is because the engines (generally) execute the match types sequentially.

In other words, if you are bidding on the same keyword, or two keywords that would both match for one particular query, an Exact Match should take precedence over a Phrase Match which should take precedence over a Broad Match.

So even though a particular query is technical a match for both one Broad Match keyword and another Phrase Match keyword, the Phrase Match should always ‘win’ and catch that query.

I should hasten to point out, this will not always be true. If you carefully watch query reports for your keywords you will see queries that were exact matches against a keyword you had set to Exact Match, yet the query lands in a Broad Match group. But in our experience these are rare in the sub 1% range of all queries.

Emphasis the Match Type Setting with Higher Bids

You can and should add punch to this precedence by ALWAYS placing rather substantially higher bids on your Exact Match vs Phrase Match, and Phrase Match vs Broad Match when they’re stacked in targeting the same terms.

And make the differences between the bids significant - it generally won’t help to bid $0.05 more for Exact Match than Broad Match. When bidding it’s easy to look at your Max CPCs (since that’s the option used to set the bid) but since your actual and average CPC is usually just a fraction of the Max you really can’t base your decision on those. Look instead at average CPC’s being reported and then set the Max’s at large enough intervals to create real steps between the different keyword/match type combinations.

By placing a substantially higher bid on the match type differentiated keywords, you’re providing another algorithmic reason for the engine to match exact match queries to your Exact Match keywords. Of course, it should also be true that you want generally higher position and higher impression share for the keywords you’re bidding on Exact Match.

A Simple Match

At the start of this series I mentioned that Match Type was a powerful and often under-utilized option. I hope these five posts so far have covered some of the ways you can get more out of these options. Time for a break from Match Type, however. Watch for a new series starting soon.