A detailed tutorial on how to research your AdWords target keyword list to improve your ROI from PPC

Keywords trigger your ads. Building and maintaining the right list of keywords is vital to getting the best return on your paid search spend. Keywords are organised into ad groups. You assign ad creatives (ad text) to these ad groups, which appear when triggered by these keywords. Therefore, knowing which keywords will perform best is important. Keyword research is the process of building keyword lists, based on the frequency at which consumers search for these words and phrases.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Keywords are the nuts and bolts of your AdWords campaigns. They let you control your visibility in search results, as well as affecting the amount you spend. If you’re setting up an account for the first time, it’s essential to build a robust keyword list as soon as you can. The quality of this list will…

We find that keyword match types are an important aspect of Adwords that there is often confusion about. It is so fundamental that all Adwords customers understand this that I thought I would try and summarise it more clearly than Google do! We also cover the topic in more depth in the Smart Insights 7 Steps guide to improving AdWords ROI that I recently updated.

I will cover these two areas of good practice in this post:

Keyword match typesNegative keyword match types

It is worth doing this because; although negative keywords and standard keywords share the same basic match types (broad, phrase and exact) these terms actually have different meanings and functions with the two types of keywords.

1. Keyword Match Types

Exact Match

The users search term must exactly match a keyword in your account in…