Keyword Match: How Do I Change It?!

Recently, I’ve noticed that some of our advertisers are having difficulty adjusting their keyword match. As a result I want to show you, our advertisers, a few tips to adjust your keywords quickly.

Our default keyword match is broad match, but we also phrase and exact match. We suggest using broad match at the start of your campaign in order to capture the most amount of traffic. Keyword match comes into play when you wish to augment your traffic with certain keywords that may be broad in nature. Exact and phrase match can help to fine-tune the traffic keywords like these receive.

If you wish to change one keyword in particular within your campaign, use our search option to locate this quickly:

Click “Go” and the keyword will be singled out.

Click on the keyword, and a dialog box will appear.

As you can see, you have three sections for broad and phrase. Exact match isn’t listed. No worries, we’ll address that in a minute.

The default broad match is set simply by adding a bid into the ‘Bid in US dollars box.’

If you wanted to adjust your keyword match to phrase match, you would place a zero (0) into the Broad match box. This is because our system interprets this as limiting the searches to phrase only.

Exact match requires that a zero be placed in both the broad and phrase bid boxes. The placement of these zeros is a flag to our system to block traffic. This will limit all searches for the keyword except exact matches.

You can also bid on all three match types at the same time. The advantage of doing this is that you could capture all types of searches at nominal cost. For example, if you have a keyword with a high volume of searches but is highly broad in nature, you could set your broad match at $0.05, so you can still gain traffic without bleeding your budget. Set phrase match at $0.07 in order to capture phrase-style searches, and then exact at $0.10. This helps you target your customers who are very specific. See the example below:

It will appear in your campaign page like this:

If you wish to change a large group of keywords at once, use the search box. This will filter the related keywords. For this example, I want to change all of the “dating service” keywords to phrase match.  I enter “service” into the search box. This is the result:

Now, to edit all of these, I’m going to click the Select All button at the top left corner. This will cause green arrows to appear to the left of the keywords.

Click on Edit, and that same dialog box will appear.

If you have different bids on keywords, you would not need to change that bid to change your keyword match. In this case, all you would have to do is place a zero in the broad box, and your bid into the Phrase box.

Depending on your strategy, adjusting your keyword match can be a helpful technique. Be sure to start your campaign at broad match in order to grab as much traffic as possible. Check your traffic stats to determine if a keyword match adjustment would be effective.