One of the fundamental ways of refining a campaign within Google AdWords is by using the 3 special forms available to target your adverts at the people that you wish to view them - specifically those people who you can be fairly certain are looking for what you can supply.

Why are these different forms important? Well, they can help us not only to create very targeted campaigns which will bring the right people to our websites but also help to improve our bid position in AdWords which is calculated on the level of bid and the Click through Rate (CTR) of the campaign. We also need to remember that AdWords campaigns can have differing goals including creating awareness, brand re-inforcement as well as traffic generation - in teh first two cases greater visibility (albeit less targeted) may be preferable.

The generic match is called Broad Match in AdWords terms - here you would simply enter the keywords as they are such as internet marketing advice and then your advert would be shown whenever these terms are searched on, in any order and with any mixture of other words. As they say, a VERY broad match which will give you the possibility of being found across a wide range of searches.

However, in most cases you will want to be able to focus much more specifically on the areas that you deal with so will want to use the other options available. These are:

Phrase Match - using quotation marks around the phrase such as “internet marketing advice” means that your adverts will appear when these keywords are searched for in this order, although they can appear with other search terms. So searches for good internet marketing advice or internet marketing advice newsletter would mean that your advert would appear.

Exact Match - using square brackets around the phrase such as [internet marketing advice] means that this exact phrase and only this phrase has to be serached for if you want your advert to appear. Anything else, including misspellings, and it won’t.

Negative Match - by using a hyphen in front of the phrase (think ‘minus’ sign) such as -bad you make sure that you add will NOT appear if that word or phrase appears anywhere in the search. So in this example, a search on bad internet marketing advice will not make your advert appear. Thankfully …!