Ok so by now, you probably have a pretty good list of keywords figured out. But you also need to know how to enter them into Adwords for the maximum effect.

There are 3 different ways to enter keywords into your Adwords account:
1) Broad matching
2) Phrase matching, and
3) Exact matching

Broad Match means you enter in the term blue widgets without anything round it. Google will then show your ad for anything containing those two words, in any order. So your ad will show up when a person searching google types in any of these phrases:

* Blue widgets
* Where can I buy some widgets that are blue
* I hate blue widgets
* How can I find some free blue widgets
* Blue magic music club widgets

Phrase Match goes one step further, you put some quotation marks around your phrase so it becomes – “blue widgets”, this then shows up only when someone types something in that has the whole phrase in it, in that order.

So you ad would show up for the following:
* Blue widgets
* I hate blue widgets
* How can I find some free blue widgets

But not for these:
* Blue magic music club widgets
* Where can I buy some widgets that are blue

And finally, there’s Exact Match, for this put square brackets around the phrase like this – [Blue widgets] and your ad will only show up for that exact term, in that exact order, with nothing else attached to it.

So it would only show up for:
* Blue widgets

But not for any of these:
* Where can I buy some widgets that are blue
* I hate blue widgets
* How can I find some free blue widgets
* Blue magic music club widgets

Most people just try to triple the size of their keyword list by wrapping everything up with every type of combination, if you want to do that then head over to:

http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/adwords-wrapper.html

That is a great free tool that does it for you, but you need to be smarter than that. Looking at the ad groups I created before then you can see there will be issues if you use the wrong kind of matching.

If you use broad match on the term ‘blue widgets’ then that means all your other ad groups are affected as that ad will show up for any keyword with ‘blue’ and ‘widgets’ in, that covers every other keyword you have! Therefore ruining all your other ad groups.

Be smart, I’d recommend using just phrase match and exact match on the terms, then probably sticking in a broad match just on the term that is common in every keyword for that ad group, like ‘cheapest blue widgets’ for the ‘cheapest blue widgets’ ad group. I know that sounds a bit confusing, so based on the keywords I put in that ad group earlier I would use the following keywords once I had added in the broad/phrase/exact match:

Ad group:
Cheapest blue widgets

Keywords:
[Buy cheapest blue widgets] – exact match
[What are the cheapest blue widgets] – exact match
“Buy cheapest blue widgets” – phrase match
“What are the cheapest blue widgets” – phrase match
Cheapest blue widgets – broad match

It gets easier after your first campaign trust me! So now to make sure you are not wasting money let’s look at negative keywords.

Negative keywords
When you use broad and phrase match you open yourself up to get more traffic, but you also open yourself up to get impressions (views) off keywords you may not want to be viewed for.

Google thinks that keywords that get clicked more in relation to their views are much more targeted and rewards them, so you need to avoid wasting views by showing your ad to people who are clearly not interested.

If you use the term ‘Cheap blue widgets’ and you use phrase and broad match on that keyword then your ad will show up for the following phrases:

* Cheap blue widgets – good
* Where can I buy cheap blue widgets – good
* I hate using cheap blue widgets – bad
* Where can I sell some cheap blue widgets – bad

People searching for the last two terms are not interested in your site selling cheap blue widgets, they don’t care about your site and won’t click your ad.

So you need to setup some negative keywords which are words that prevent your ad from showing, so if you enter ‘hate’ and ’sell’ as negative keywords your ad would stop being shown for the last two keyword phrases above.

You can pick up some powerful negative keywords when you are doing your keyword research, just make a note of all the specific words in the keywords you definitely don’t want to show up for and you have a great list!

You can enter negative keywords at the campaign level or during normal ad group creation, I will show you exactly how later on. So your task now is to go out and find enough keywords for about 4 tightly focused ad groups and some negative keywords too, remember everything above and try to get some really good ones!