When buying keywords in AdWords, it’s possible to use several different match types which control how your ads are shown.
- Exact match, whose symbol is [keyword], will show an ad only if the search query (what the user types into the search box) matches exactly your ‘bid keyword.’ That’s relatively straightforward.
- Phrase match, symbol is “keyword”, will show an ad if the searcher’s query contains your bid keyword (in exactly the right order)
- Broad match, symbol is keyword, will match damn near anything. I’ve seen some pretty loose interpretations of Google’s broad match. Seriously, be careful here. Left unchecked, broad match is a good way to spend a lot of money and not show a ton of return. (Worse yet, this is the default match type for keywords purchased via AdWords!)
The net of what this means is that the keyword phrase you purchased may not align exactly with what the searcher typed into the search box. If you use any match type aside from exact, the data that you see in adwords and google analytics actually represents the average across all search queries that were matched against that bid keyword. Some of these specific search queries no doubt perform very well, others poorly, but we can’t tell that from the data we have; it’s all averages.
This data is available in the search query performance report in adwords, but has been historically very difficult to get into Google Analytics (where you could use it to understand bounce rates, levels of site engagement, and ecommerce order value of individual search queries). Up until about a month ago, there were several Google Analytics Hacks that allowed you to add the view the actual search phrase in GA using a filter that would read the referral URL along with some fancy regular expressions that would pull the actual search query out of the referring URL and put them into a User Defined variable or add them to the Google Analytics keyword data field. These still work, but are no longer necessary!
Recently, this Matched Search Query data has been added to Google Analytics
(out of the box, no filtering or regex required)!
Go into Traffic Sources Report > Adwords > Keywords. When the report loads, add a second dimension by clicking the dropdown next to the AdWords Keyword Column. Pick “Matched Search Query”. The new data will give you great insights into how to better manage your keywords.
Google Analytics Matched Search Query Report
Have some search queries that perform like crap?
- Add negative keywords to exclude the offending keyword modifiers
- Change your match type to something more restrictive
- Bid on the poorly-performing search query as an exact match bid keyword, but send it to a different landing page, or show a different ad.
Things going particularly well? (here’s what Chip and Dan Heath refer to as the Bright Spots)
- Try to replicate them or wring more out of them.
- Add the best performing search queries as exact match bid keywords, and bid more for them to boost position.
What other uses can you think of?
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I’ve been getting some good results by using the new broad match modifier (+). This has helped eliminate some of the performance problems from using straight broad matches.
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