AdWords Embedded Match – What Else Aren’t They Telling Us?
Keywords April 7th, 2008A reader wonders: The other day I heard the term "embedded match" for Adwords for the first time. Is this something totally new and are there any other matching options not of common knowledge?
My pithy, punctuationally-challenged reply:
-[keyword] is embedded match – just a combo of negative and exact
Say you sell whiteboard accessories and supplies, and you want your ad to appear for
whiteboard cleaner
whiteboard marker
whiteboard eraser
but not
whiteboard
whiteboards
because you don’t sell whiteboards. (Dude, you should sooo sell whiteboards. But that’s another topic…)
So you add
-[whiteboard]
and
-[whiteboards]
to your keyword list
Voila, you’ve just created an embedded match.
As far as I know, there are no other secret match types in AdWords.
No TweetBacks yet. (Be the first to Tweet this post)
April 8th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Howie,
I am so confused. Google says I can bid on a competitor’s trademark so long as the trademark doesn’t appear in the ad text, but the competitor just had their lawyer send me a letter telling me to stop.
Do you know what the trends are over the past few years when it comes to bidding on someone else’s trademark? Is it going strong, or are people backing off due to legal pressure or some other reason.
Thanks Howie!
April 8th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Greg – the short answer: nobody knows what the rules are in the Online Wild West.
Here is a story from January about one advertiser suing another for copyright infringement. The reason: the defendant bid on the plaintiff’s name as a Google keyword.
And here’s a recent article about rescuecom’s appeal in a similar lawsuit.
So what’s the answer? Stay tuned…
June 23rd, 2010 at 10:57 pm
Hey Howie,
Sorry to drudge up this old thread, but I stumbled across it when trying to find Google's explanation of "embedded match" (and you outranked them, you stud!)
I think embedded match can also be used to increase your level of control with short-tail keywords that get lots of broad match traffic, but don't actually convert that well themselves.
For example, say you have a term like widgets (broad match) that is converting at a $5 CPA, and say that same term as an exact match is converting at $15 CPA. If you manage keywords at the keyword level, you'll most likely end up raising your bid amounts for the broad match version of widgets, and lowering your bid amounts for exact match versions of [widgets].
However, if you don't have embedded match in place, broad match will "contaminate" your exact match efforts, and even if you have a max bid of $.20 for [widgets], you could very well end up bidding $.50 if your broad match phrase has a max bid of $.50.
The only way of preventing that from happening is to separate broad/phrase/exact into 3 separate adgoups, and use embedded match.
ie:
Exact Adgroup:
[widgets]
Phrase Adgroup:
"widgets"
-[widgets]
Broad Adgroup:
widgets
-"widgets"
-[widgets]
PS – Thanks for hosting your last bootcamp in Chicago! I came away with a TON of actionable items, and have already paid for the trip 10x over!
June 23rd, 2010 at 11:00 pm
Hey Howie,
Sorry to drudge up this old thread, but I stumbled across it when trying to find Google's explanation of "embedded match" (and you outranked them, you stud!)
I think embedded match can also be used to increase your level of control with short-tail keywords that get lots of broad match traffic, but don't actually convert that well themselves.
For example, say you have a term like widgets (broad match) that is converting at a $5 CPA, and say that same term as an exact match is converting at $15 CPA. If you manage keywords at the keyword level, you'll most likely end up raising your bid amounts for the broad match version of widgets, and lowering your bid amounts for exact match versions of [widgets]. (as backwards as that seems, this is the case for many short-tail terms that have hundreds, if not thousands of variations that can't possibly all be bid on.)
However, if you don't have embedded match in place, broad match will "contaminate" your exact match efforts, and even if you have a max bid of $.20 for [widgets], you could very well end up bidding $.50 if your broad match phrase has a max bid of $.50.
The only way of preventing that from happening is to separate broad/phrase/exact into 3 separate adgoups, and use embedded match.
ie:
Exact Adgroup:
[widgets]
Phrase Adgroup:
"widgets"
-[widgets]
Broad Adgroup:
widgets
-"widgets"
-[widgets]
PS – Thanks for hosting your last bootcamp in Chicago! I came away with a TON of actionable items, and have already paid for the trip 10x over!