Paid Search: Keywords

If you’ve been following along, you should by now know that there are these rather important things in paid search called keywords. They exist in ad groups (which in turn exist in campaigns), and they define what search terms you bid in.

Let’s stop here for a second and make sure we’re clear on the distinction between a keyword and a search term. A keyword is an entity that exists inside your account. A search term is something that a user types into a search engine. A keyword defines which search terms you bid on, but it’s not identical to a search term.

With that in mind, how exactly does a keyword define which search terms you bid on?

Understanding match types

To understand the relationship between keywords and search terms, we first have to understand the different types of keywords, known as different match types.

How do exact match keywords work?

We’ve actually seen one match type already, exact match. This is the simplest type of keyword, and it (with some exceptions that we’ll get to) denotes a one-to-one matching between keyword and search term. To put that less abstractly, a keyword of swimming costume that has an exact match type will only show ads on the search term swimming costume (italics to show that it’s a search term)…