Hello and welcome to Your Daily Concept “Get Smarter Every Day”, today is PPC Tuesday here at Exclusive Concepts

Today is Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010. My name is Kevin and I will be your presenter for the day as we discuss the Google AdWords Broad Match Modifier feature.

Historically, Google AdWords has had the paid search standard of three match types for their keywords. This allowed advertisers to control costs by refining their audiences while still advertising on keywords that were more general terms rather than long-tail terms. Recently, they have introduced Broad Match Modifiers. Before I blow your mind on what this is, let’s quickly explain the main differences of the three match types.
While Broad match allows for misspellings, spelling variations and word order variations, it often drive a high volume of traffic that may not be in the buying phase. This ends up costing the advertiser a lot with receiving very little in return regarding sales.
Phrase match allowed the advertiser to take keyword targeting a step further by requiring the keyword terms to trigger your ad when used in the original word order but allowing other words to precede or follow the keyword phrase. This gave you more control over your audience and many saw their click thru rates dip but their conversion rates increase. Which makes sense since what you were beginning to do was bring a much more motivated shopper while reducing your spend.
Exact match took this refinement a step further by allowing advertisers to simply have their ads be triggered when a search is made using the exact keyword being bid on and not allowing anything else within the search. This gave the advertiser explicit control over what keywords should trigger your ad further reducing traffic and controlling one’s cost.
This has been the lay of the land in AdWords for years. All match types have their place in a PPC campaign and many advertisers learn by trial and error. One topic that has been debated over the years has been how to utilize broad match effectively without turning to phrase match in an effort to capture new searches and in the end new sales.

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At Exclusive Concepts we have spoken in past videos of utilizing Search Query reports for new keyword opportunities and implementing negative terms to refine exposure. Often times we find highly relevant keywords that led to conversions and will add them to the ad group. With 20% of daily searches still being completely unique this will continue to be an essential part of running a successful campaign and growing your keyword list.
These keywords could be different stemming variations such as “discount flooring“ when you have “discount floor” as a broad match. “Discount floor” on phrase or exact match would not have triggered your ad thus you may have missed the opportunity to grab that conversion. You may also find that people performing searches often use abbreviations or simple misspellings. Again, using Phrase or Exact eliminates these conversions from occurring.
So now you may be wondering what can you do in order to capture this target audience but yet control your costs? Well Google now has an answer and it comes in the form of it’s Broad Match Modifier targeting feature. This feature allows you to run your keywords on Broad match in order to allow these variations to trigger your ad while requiring that certain terms must always be present within the search.

To implement the Broad Match Modifier in your campaigns it is a simple one step process. Google suggests creating a new keyword rather than editing a current keyword. We agree because you don’t want to lose all that valuable historical data! So when you create a new keyword you will need to add a plus sign directly in front of the term that you wish to make “permanent” within a search query. You can apply as many plus signs as you wish to maintain control over the traffic that will trigger your ad. In this example, we are adding the keyword phrase “leather shoes” and making both words a requirement for the ad to be triggered. This will ensure that our ad will be triggered even if these terms are used in a search but are misspelled, used singularly, or out of order.
Make sure that you don’t place an unneeded space in between the plus sign and the term that you wish to modify. That’s all it takes.
Is the Broad Match Modifier feature right for your account? Well, I do have one piece of advice. If you are currently running all broad match keywords by implementing the Broad Match Modifier you may end up seeing a drop in traffic and sales. Although if you are utilizing phrase and exact match types, you may end up finding by extending your reach in a controlled manner will increase your traffic and in turn hopefully increase your sales!

That completes today’s Daily Concept on this fine PPC Tuesday. I hope that you enjoyed today’s topic and be sure to check back in tomorrow for Conversion Wednesday!
Thanks for watching and have a great day!