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As a digital marketer, you will invariably come across situations where you need very tight control over the matching between your keywords and search terms, ie: where you need to claim back exact match, for the sake of your budget.
For example, let’s say you are advertising in an extremely competitive (read ‘expensive CPC’s or ‘OMG-I-Paid-That-For-A-Click?’) space like ‘personal injury law’ and you already know the search terms that work for you. Let’s also say that you’re trying to own the term [motor vehicle accident lawyer near me] so you bid on this keyword as an exact match. As many of you know, Google will match that keyword to all sorts of variations that are not exactly this search term; some of which will work fine but some will just waste your client’s money.
When you’re potentially paying hundreds of dollars per click, you can’t afford to let Google “work it out” by trial and error, especially when you already know what you want to target! Even if you have this exact match keyword inside its own ad group (a well known structure referred to as a “Single Keyword Ad Group”, or SKAG), Google will still do their intent matching trick and spend your money on other searches that they deem to have similar intent… and don’t we love that ?????
Fortunately, there’s a fantastic strategy that can help ensure that you’re still matching search terms to keywords effectively. This strategy involves using a SKAG structure and the right traffic sculpting strategy, which involves using a combination of exact and broad match negative keywords.
Supporting this strategy with tools like scripts, PPC Samurai or Adpulse* can add automation to the mix; speeding it up dramatically.
Specific to Google or Microsoft Ads search campaigns, a SKAG structure is a strategy in which you create a separate ad group for each keyword you want to target. This allows you to create highly targeted ad copy and landing pages that are specifically designed to address the user’s search intent. By having one ad group for each keyword, you can improve the relevance of your ads to the user’s search query.
To match search terms to keywords effectively, and to claim back exact match, follow these steps:
This strategy works best with exact match keywords, but if you load an exact match keyword into your ad group and you see the “low volume” flag, you can upgrade the match type to phrase match (leaving the original exact match keyword enabled in the ad group). If you still see the low volume flag against the phrase match keyword, you can upgrade again to broad match. The strategy still works fine for broad match keywords, but takes longer to lock down your search term/keyword matching compared to exact matching.
If you’ve loaded your keyword as a broad match and are still seeing the flag, you can look at ways to shorten the keyword, take back to phrase match and see if that gets rid of it.
That low volume flag is telling you that whilst Google technically can match this keyword to a search term, it’s unlikely to do so. Your impressions for that search term will be higher if you can get a keyword with no low volume flag to match it.
In our example above, here’s a progression I might have worked through to find a keyword that will trigger the search term in our example:
Once the ad group is live, use a script, PPC Samurai or Adpulse* to run a one word NGram report on the search terms that are actually triggering in the ad group. Any individual words that are not part of your desired search term, add as broad match single word negative keywords to that ad group.
When checking your search term report, grab any full search terms that are not an exact match to your targeted search term, and add these as exact match negatives to the ad group as well.
In our example SKAG, let’s say the following search terms are triggering:
We would add the following negative keywords to our ad group:
Using the combination of broad match single word negatives plus full term exact match negatives gives us the fastest pathway to campaign improvement by locking down your search term/keyword matching.
If you have existing search term data in your account, you can scrape those search terms and use the process above to generate a very comprehensive list of negative keywords for your new ad group, even before it even gets its first impression!
Bear in mind that there are limits to the number of keywords (including negatives) that can be applied (see here: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6372658?hl=en-AU), so adding negatives that are related to the targeted search term will ensure you don’t run out of room and can continue to add more negatives over time.
Using a SKAG structure with the right combination of keywords and negative keywords can help you match search terms to keywords effectively and claim back exact match. Initially your keyword will be matching against many search terms that aren’t exactly what you are targeting, but after running this system for a few weeks you should see a dramatic improvement in the search term/keyword matching.
PLEASE NOTE: (and this is important) we rarely recommend using just SKAGs – they should be used as one of many tools in your arsenal, for example, when intent matching isn’t appropriate for the situation.
Matching search terms to keywords is a crucial aspect of digital marketing. When it’s important to have an exact match between your keyword and search term, using a SKAG structure with the right traffic sculpting strategy can help you achieve this much more effectively; you can claim back exact match.
By using a custom script or tools like PPC Samurai or Adpulse to run manage your negative keywords at scale, you can confidently build and manage thousands of SKAGs across many accounts, allowing you to reap the additional benefits of SKAGs (tight ad and landing page relevance, high CTRs, higher quality score etc).
*Adpulse will soon be releasing an “ad group locking” feature that will allow you to completely automate this strategy, so put your hand up to try it first!
We love talking PPC and spend most of our time chatting with agencies, so if you have a question please do drop us a line!
Also, Adpulse comes with a 14-day free trial, and right now the first month is only $19.99/mth, so it’s a low-risk way to try it for yourself. Sign up now!
