Watch Your Keyword Matching Options in Adwords

This week I was in Houston and Austin speaking and being a panelist for their respective Online Marketing Summits. Be sure to check out their Cities and Agendas page and attend an event… the quality of the presentations were outstanding and conference host, Aaron Kahlow, kept the events engaging and fun.

Yesterday I shared a tip from Apogee Search on buying links to a third party site. One other tip I received at the summit seems like a total beginner tip. To be honest, I thought that Google Adwords defaulted to an exact match, but they don’t! They default to a broad match (seems evil if you ask me)! There are 4 types of matching algorithms:

1. keyword = broad match
2. “keyword” = match exact phrase
3. [keyword] = match exact term only
4. – keyword = don’t match this term

At my Navy Veteran’s web site, I’ve seen a number of Veterinarian ads come up! I’m sure it’s hitting off of the keyword ‘Vet’, but the advertiser should ensure that he looks for Vet, while ensuring it doesn’t match ‘Navy Vet’.

One last note, if the old Adwords interface confused you… I’m right there with you. I logged in today and the new beta interface is quite nice. There should be a link in the top right to preview it if you get a chance. In the new interface, the keyword matching is totally hidden and you need to click a link to expand it!