Brent Hodgson, Copywriter

Copywriter and Internet Marketing Consultant

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When Broad Match Works… and When Broad Match Sucks

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Interesting stuff keeps pouring out of the Google Adwords data that I’m collecting through Tracked.to

As I’ve mentioned already, Google’s broad matching is “VERY broad” - more broad than most people give it credit.

Most of the time Broad Match completely misinterprets your keyword, and gives you a bunch of crappy keyword clicks…

But every now and again, it grabs a few clicks on a really great keyword.

Going through my Tracked.to data yesterday, I found I’d received a click for a new search term…

I’d set up a new campaign around the keywords “copywriter” and “copywriting” - in broad, phrase and exact match. The purpose of this campaign was to drive a little traffic to this blog, but mainly to gather more Tracked.to data.

Here’s what I found:

Although I was bidding on the keyword “copywriting”, I’d received a click for the keyword “Harlan Kilstein” - the name of another copywriter, and a specific “buy-term”.

Awesome!

You can bet I’m specifically testing the effectiveness of this keyword now!

I had a look in Wordtracker and the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool - if you look for keywords around “copywriter”, neither of these tools will pick up Harlan Kilstein’s name as a keyword - but based on early data, it highly likely that this keyword will result in signups and sales for me.

This is gold-level keyword research - I’m gathering real-life data on the precise keywords that result in clicks, in any market I want.

I’m a huge believer in Tracked.to’s ability to uncover negative keywords, and positive keywords (like in the example above) - “gold-nugget”, high-converting keywords that other keyword research tools won’t give you. And I genuinely want to see it help you too.
There’s still time to jump in on the Tracked.to Closed Beta, and trial Tracked.to for yourself for free.

To find out more about Tracked.to or the Closed Beta, visit http://www.tracked.to

Popularity: 3%

Posted to Categories: Google Adwords

April 21st, 2008 · Brent Hodgson

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9 responses so far ↓

  • 1 9 Things I Dislike about Google Automatic Matching - Scott Clark // May 19, 2008 at 8:42 am

    [...] Google does a pretty bad job of limiting broad match.  With this already causing grief, it seems problematic to me to have further expansion of Google’s matching [...]

  • 2 When Broad Match Works… and When Broad Match Sucks // Aug 27, 2008 at 8:56 am

    [...] | Popularity: 0 | Entries: 10 (+10) | Updated: 33m 55s ago | | Add to My FeedsRemove from My Feeds When Broad Match Works… and When Broad Match SucksAugust 26th, 2008Interesting stuff keeps pouring out of the Google Adwords data that I’m [...]

  • 3 tomartomartini // Jan 6, 2009 at 8:45 am

    From the desk of Perry Marshall …
    Perry Marshall also submitts”AdGooRoo.com monitors millions of search engine results and they are noting a 54% growth in Google’s “first page advertisers” - see http://www.adgooroo.com/blog/ for their full report.” to back up his statement.

    I feel the above tool “Tracked.to.” is essential.

    As there is a lot of confusion on how to make Broad Match Work..the above article is clearly
    deals with this misunerstanding.

  • 4 tomartomartini // Jan 6, 2009 at 8:48 am

    From the desk of Perry Marshall

    “Since Google is loosening it’s standards, our broad match keywords are
    showing up more and more to the unwashed masses, where they are less
    relevant, in order for them to keep their click income up. It’s like they
    are taking our search keyword campaigns, and throwing them into the
    content network.

    The more keywords you have in a broad match long tail, the easier it is
    for Google to justify doing this. ” see above comment.

  • 5 9 Things I Dislike about The Google Adwords Automatic Matching Idea // Apr 2, 2009 at 6:54 am

    [...] Google does a pretty bad job of limiting broad match. With this already causing grief, are we really going to make things better by loosening it further? Yes, I know - some of you will [...]

  • 6 Sandy Brisbane // Oct 22, 2010 at 9:09 am

    Can Harlan Kilstein ’see’ that you are using his name as a keyword? I imagine that it would make him cross if he could….

  • 7 Brent Hodgson // Oct 22, 2010 at 2:58 pm

    I’m not at all. It’s Google’s matching algorithms that are saying the keyword I’m bidding on (”copywriter”) is the same as “Harlan Kilstein”

    I think he’d be happy with this though - that Google thinks his name is synonymous with the word “Copywriter” ;-)

  • 8 Las Vegas caterers // Apr 27, 2011 at 2:38 am

    I’ve been surfing online more than three hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It is pretty worth enough for me. Personally, if all web owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the internet will be a lot more useful than ever before.

  • 9 Weight Loss Gym // May 11, 2011 at 2:40 am

    Yadda Yadda Yadda. Less filler, more substance. It’ a shame, this used to be such an useful blog.

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