Yet Another Newbie

confusion about using the various matches...

[TheTryer]

I'm sure this is a common problem for people starting off but I haven't been able to find any answers trawling the adwords pages or these forums, so if someone could provide some guidance/ point me in the right direction I'd really appreciate it.

Basically, My Confusion is wrt, generating certain behaviour by using the different types of matches, broad, phrase etc. and two general questions about keywords.

Firs the General Questions,
a) do keywords in an Adgroup combine or are they independant entities, e.g. if I had keyword: blue and keyword: bucket would this be relevant to all searches pretaining to both blue and bucket? or only to all searches for both? eg navy containers etc.?

b) pretty much the inverse of the above question:
if I had keyword: blue bucket, would this be relevant for searches for either blue or bucket by themselves? or only searches that contained both blue and bucket

and finally, the meat of the question.

Sticking with this Blue Bucket I want to sell,
If I wanted to catch all combinations and variations on the theme blue bucket without catching too much surplus what would the best way to do this be?
i.e. keyword: "blue bucket", keyword: "blue buckets", keyword: "navy buckets", keyword: "navy container", keyword "blue container"

or

keyword: blue
keyword: bucket

or etc.

Basically I think I might be looking for something in between the flexibilty of broad match and phrase match, or a way to simulate this, i.e. I have two keywords which must occur together but I'd to catch combinations and plurals of synonyms to these words too.

Hope I've describe what I'm trying to do accurately enough, Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Yours confused,

The Tryer

[vibgyor79]

>>> do keywords in an Adgroup combine or are they independant entities

If your keyword list contains -

blue
buckets

then your ad will be shown if somebody types in "blue buckets"

>>> if I had keyword: blue bucket, would this be relevant for searches for either blue or bucket by themselves

No. You ad won't be displayed for "blue" or "buckets"

>>> If I wanted to catch all combinations and variations on the theme blue bucket

Type BLUE in the google adwords keyword suggestion tool and collect all the similar keywords

blue
blue containers
blue buckets
blue bucket
-free
-bazookas

Put these in an adgroup. I suppose you are familiar with the concept of negative keywords

Now go back to the Google keyword suggestion tool and type in "buckets", "bucket", "container" etc.

[TheTryer]

Thanks a million,

yup am familiar with negative keywords,
that's exactly what I was looking for. I had an inkling that might be the way to do it but wasn't 100% sure and if there was away to avoid typing out all the combinations that would have been cool too,
again thanks a lot,

appreciate your time,

The Tryer

[TheTryer]

Oh, One last thing,
when you say:

>If your keyword list contains -
>
>blue
>buckets
>
>then your ad will be shown if somebody types in "blue >buckets"

will my ad be shown for searches of only, blue, or bucket in this case?

thanks again.

[UpDown]

An alternative view: I would not be too happy with using very general terms plus lots of negatives. Using 'blue' as a keyword will display for a search for just 'blue' and it will also display for 'blue tooth' 'blue whale' and millions of other possibilities. Even with many negatives you will still get a lot of junk impressions and hence a low CTR and high cost.

Much better would be to list all the combinations. It might take longer to set up but it will be a more successful campaign. I would suggest your initial keywords should be:

blue bucket
"blue bucket"
[blue bucket]
navy container
"navy container"
[navy container]

and so on.

You might like to use the script which jonathanleger has set up, the subject of a previous posting in this forum. It would be a great help in combining two lists in this manner.

Then you monitor the CTR and conversion for each of the keywords, and your log files, to come up with even more targetted keywords such as 'big blue bucket' 'blue shiny bucket'.

UpDown

[vibgyor79]

I agree. Avoid using a 'keyword', use a 'key phrase' (a two word keyword).

However, if you want to be a little adventurous, you could try using only the exact match of the keyword like [container]. Install the conversion tracking code and see how it performs though.

The exact match of your main single word keyword generally has low competition. Since it is an exact match, your CTR won't be very bad either (will be above 1% in most cases)