Keywords are perhaps the most important aspect of any AdWords campaign. The keywords you choose would be the defining point of how successful your ad campaign would be. You have to choose carefully, considering factors such as the keywords that are actually related to your product or service, commonly searched on Google, likely to get noticed and clicked, and also within your budget for bidding.

However, another important factor is setting the options for matching. This is usually used for cost control, since you wouldn’t want your ads to appear on less relevant searches. You might prefer a stricter keyword matching setting, so your ads will only appear on searches for exact phrases or as close as possible to how you phrase your keywords.

On the other hand, you might also choose to go for a looser approach, where less-relevant matches may also be accepted, such as alternate arrangements and even spellings for your keywords.

Alternatively, you can choose to restrict your ads to appear only on searches that do not contain certain words. This is for use in those cases that you would rather limit your ads from appearing on searches you consider to be irrelevant.

Your options:

• Broad match
• Expanded match
• Phrase match
• Exact match
• Negative keyword

We will discuss these in detail on our next article.