Hyphens in Keywords

[shaka1978]

If I am bidding on the keyword 'blue widget' will my ad also be shown for people searching for 'blue-widget' or do I need to add this keyword too?

Thanks,
Neil

[anallawalla]

May depend on your niche but the answer seems to be "yes" since an hyphen is a space for Google. I can reproduce slightly different Adwords results using kwd1-kwd2 versus kwd1 kwd2 as broad match. This may simply be the result of ad rotation. I play safe and bid on both.

[shaka1978]

Thanks anallawalla.

[shaka1978]

Actually, I just looked at all my accounts and have some interesting findings. This is what I initially thought:

Don’t use hyphens, i.e. use ‘blue widgets’ not ‘blue-widgets’ as well. Why? Google treats a hyphen as a space so they are the same thing. If you have both in your account Google randomly picks which one to use – that’ll have all the impressions/clicks, the other will sit on zero. You want it to pick the none-hyphen one if using dynamic keyword insertion because then Google will display it as such and make the copy look more relevant – matching the majority of searches, hardly anyone searches with a hyphen.

For the first 2 weeks of the month I had a key phrase in one account – the none-hyphen one was picked and a CTR of 20% over 1000+ impressions. I was restructuring my accounts and moved it to another, same bid, same copy, the hyphen one got picked up and CTR only 7% or so for a similar no. of impressions.

However, when I test this I get weird results. Search for two keywords with and without hyphens brings different results, so I’m not 100% sure. But then searching for the same key phrase, waiting, then searching again brings different results too – Google seems to have some weird inconsistencies.

Still not sure whether to bin my hyphen keywords or not - anyone else have any ideas?

Cheers,
Neil

[realgames]

I only use keyword 'phrases' in my adgroups so can only comment on my experience on that. When I started my campaign I included the keyword phrases "blue-widgets" and "blue widgets". I regret it now because all the impressions and clicks show against "blue-widgets" with none against "blue widgets". I would prefer the keyword with the stats to be "blue widgets" cos then I could use it for dynamic keyword insertion but now the only way I can do that would be to delete "blue-widget" which would lose me my hard won CTR. In short, if you are using phrase matching I would not include the hyphenated version.