Friday, February 24, 2006

Handy Online AdWords Tool

If you use Google's "AdWords" pay-per-click system to drive traffic to your website, you'll know that you shouldn't just target two or three keywords.

You bid on dozens or hundreds to have an effective campaign. Maybe you use a service such as WordTracker or software such as AdWord Analyzer to research your keywords. Either way, you end up with a big list.

But then, there are three keyword matching options in the Adwords system:
  • Broad match: If you have jewellery box in your keyword list, your ad will show when the searcher includes both these words in the search term - in any order. So if the search term was "silver box for jewellery", your ad will be displayed. This is the least targeted option.

  • Phrase match: If you enclose your keywords in speech marks thus: "jewellery box", your ad will show if the searcher includes those words in the same order. So your ad will show if the search term is "silver jewellery box", but not if it is "silver box for jewellery".

  • Exact match: If you put square brackets around your search term thus: [jewellery box], your ad will show only if those two words were searched for without any other words in the search term. This is the tightest of the targeting options.

It's very useful to use all three matching methods to get as broader coverage as possible. But there's a problem..

I've just used the AdWords system to generate keywords starting with the initial word "jewellery". It came up with 140 different keywords. Now how long will it take me to produce two more variations of each phrase - one with speech marks and one with square brackets? And how boring is that job?

Fortunately, I've found a handy (and free) web service that does the job in seconds. It's kindly provided by a guy called Mike. Just copy your keyword list, paste it into a box on Mike's page, hit a button - and out pops all the keywords with all the match options. Great stuff! And there's no fluff about having to sign up for anything. Just use this great little tool if you are an AdWords user. Go to it here.

Incidentally, even if you aren't an AdWords user, you can still use the AdWords tool to generate keyword lists. This can be handy for all sorts of purposes. Access the AdWords tool here.

(From my Marketing Magic "News Update" newsletter)

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