← The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
How Google Ads Keyword Matching Works (Episode 450)
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Foreign hello and welcome to the Paid Search podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about Google Ads. I have a question from a listener and I have a very interesting discussion about some documentation that I found from Google that I would like to go through because every now and then it's incredibly important to understand how does this engine work? How does Google Ads work? That's what we're going to talk about today. If you think this is basic, it's not. This is going to be enlightening for those of you that have been around for a while and I can assure you for those who have not been around, this is new to you. It will be incredibly enlightening. Some really interesting stuff that I take for granted and perhaps misunderstand and I'm sure many of you also as well. Before I jump into the main part of the show, I want to tell you about optio.com PSP. This is the software that has changed so many Google Ads accounts. It's impossible for me to tell you all the stories. I hear about it all the time and it is a real thing, I promise you. I talk to people and they tell me thanks for the podcast. And then in the same breath they say and thanks for Optio because they're so glad to have it because it's such a wonderful fast tool to help them get to the point of how to improve their Google Ads accounts. How do they improve, improve their bids? What kind of keywords do they look into? Which ones do they block? How do they check on things that are just important to getting things done? This is the tool to help you get things done in Google Ads. You can try it for free for 28 days. That's a special link just for you listeners of this show for free@opteo.com PSP to try a free 28 day trial and you're probably gonna love it. I'll tell you what, everyone does and it's a phenomenal tool. All right, so I'm gonna jump into the main part of the show in just a moment, but first I have a really interesting question from Francois, I believe. Thank you for the pronunciation, help on that and let's read the question. Hello Chris. First of all, thank you for. Thank you so much for your podcast. It's a gold mine. I hope you continue for years. Thank you. A little background About Me. My name is Francois from Canada, Montreal. I own a marketing agency specializing in Google Ads, lead generation and service based businesses. I have a question about Impression Share. All right. I love Talking about impression share, it's incredibly important. After multiple analysis, I cannot quite understand something. For some campaigns I have an impression share of 40 to 50%, which is very good. Yet we struggle to generate good volume of leads at all. On the other hand, for campaigns we have an impression share of 15%, but we're able to generate leads successfully. So why can I have a really good impression share percentage, which means I'm there half the time on some campaigns, but it doesn't seem to make an objective difference in actually generating leads? Right. Of course, my example is quite general, but if you could clarify the actual objective behind the impression share, I'm confused about what actions I should take. Great question, Francois. So let me boil down the question for those of you that didn't quite follow. Essentially he's saying, I have one campaign that has a impression share of 50%, yet it does nothing for me. It generates no leads, it has no value as far as leads sales. You know, there's nothing valuable that I'm getting there. Yet I have this other campaign that's a 15% search impression share and it's generating something, it's providing value calls, leads, sales, whatever it is. How can this be? Why is this? Well, really, really good question. I love the idea here is because, and I'm going to take some fault here because perhaps I have led my listeners down the path of thinking that high impression share means success, because the fact is, is that it doesn't. And I will lay out this example that will help you hopefully understand where we went wrong on this. So let's say campaign A, which is getting 50% search impression share has keywords ABC, right? Keyword A, keyword B, keyword C. Alright? And those are generating no conversions at all. And this campaign has a lot of budget. It has exact match keywords, it has phrase match keywords and great ad copy, really good quality scores. And it's just, it's just cranking out really good ABC traffic, okay? And getting a good percentage of the market doing it. Great. Now campaign, the other campaign has keywords D, E and F. All right? Keywords D, E and F are all broad match, okay? They're all broad match and the budget's a little lower. Let's say quality score is even a little worse on this. In the end, it's leading to a much lower search impression share. So the search impression share on this is 15%. Okay? Here is the pin that will change your mind and help you realize impression share is not a measurement of success. The reason the second campaign def. Right? The campaign with keywords DEF in there has some kind of success, while the other one doesn't is because the product you're selling is a DEF product, right? In some way, these DEF keywords are delivering better qualified traffic. Traffic that actually converts matches the need of the services that people are looking for. And it's converting. Meanwhile, ABC is doing something very efficient. It's getting ABC traffic at a very efficient rate. But you're selling def. You're getting ABC traffic, but you're selling def. So nothing converts this. It's just off somehow. Now, keep in mind, both campaigns are doing a good job. DEF campaign is getting good traffic. It's just not as ubiquitous. It doesn't go as far in the reach of its keywords. Right? It doesn't. It only shows up 15% of the time. But ABC is much more efficient. It shows up all the time for abc, but it's the wrong traffic. That is why you can have success. Now, let's say, let's say, because I imagine this is the instance, let's say what if both campaigns had DEF in them, right? Campaign 1 and Campaign 2 had def keywords. One has 50% impression share, one has 15% impression share. How could it be that the 15% impression share is doing so much worse? Well, the fact is, is that there's something different. The traffic that it's generating for some reason is different in some critical way. Let's say campaign number one, def number one is getting mainly E and F and a little bit of D traffic, right? But campaign number two, which is getting all the conversions, gets mostly D traffic and hardly any E or F, right? There's some kind of subtle difference between these two campaigns. One's leading to value and the other one's not. This is a highly simplified explanation. In no way does this cover all the nuance of, you know, match types and bids and smart bidding and all that kind of stuff. But hopefully you understand the main thing to take home here is this. Search impression share is not a measurement of success. Do not use impression share. Impression share loss due to rank, Impression share loss due to budget. Do not use those as measurements of success. They are secondary metrics that only become important after you have achieved success. Campaigns that are not successful, that are not generating value for some, you know, business, for some. Some kind of value in the account. You should not care what the search impression share is. The first goal is to get qualified traffic that converts conversions. Conversions, sales leads, whatever it is, that's the primary goal. Okay? So don't Put your secondary metrics above your primary. Primary metrics are conversions. Secondary metrics is everything and anything else under that. Okay, so hopefully that clears that up and that should perhaps something I might need to revisit again because I imagine I've spoken so much about search impression share that people think that it's a guiding light of success, but it certainly, certainly is second to conversions. Alright, so here's the main topic of the show and real quick, I remind you, if you haven't check out optio.com o p-e o.com PSP the only sponsor of the show, been around for years. I cannot recommend their software enough. I use it. Many, many of my listeners use it and tell me about it all the time. Does everything from reporting to helping you manage your budget to your bids, to telling you when your website goes down, to helping you improve your ad copy and everything in between. Check it out@optio.com PSP okay, so here's what I want to talk about next. Okay, there is a document which I will link in the show notes that talks about just the basics of how keyword matching works, right? And that's one of the sections of this document. It is from Google and I think it's great for us to get back to some of the basics about how Google Ads keyword matching works because if you don't understand this concept, you're probably going to miss the boat, you're going to miss the, the point of everything. The reason I make these decisions that I, that I talk about in Google Ads is because of how this system works. So let's go through it. I'm going to start at the first step, all the way down to the moment before the ad shows for that search. Okay, so in a who knows how many milliseconds, this is what happens when someone does a search. Your keywords are triggered in order to show an ad. So this is the millisecond process that happens in everybody's account. Step number one. And I'm going to read some of this straight from the documentation and then I'm going to interpret it for you. When a user enters a search on Google, the system interprets their input using information like spell corrections, synonyms and related concepts. Okay, to boil that down, essentially the important thing to remember about this is the system interprets their input. So what Google says. So right away, step one, how Google Ads works. When someone does a search on Google immediately, it is not Google looking at the word and matching it to the keyword anymore. And we're Going to get back into that a little bit later. Google talks about that a bit more. But the number one thing, when Google sees a search on Google, they don't just look at the words. They use their algorithmic AI, blah, blah, blah, stuff, whatever they're calling it, to interpret what you mean by that search. And that matters to advertisers. Okay, step two is this. The system checks for eligibility based on keyword match type, right? So it immediately, in nanoseconds, I'm sure, scans through your keywords and determines which ones are eligible based on match type. What that means is your broad keywords are going to trigger searches a lot more often than your phrase match. Your phrase match is going to trigger keywords a lot more often than your exact match. And Google decides which one is a positive match, which keyword can potentially match for this person's single search. Okay, so this is important because there's a system that happens immediately. We're introduced to the fact that broad match keywords will match more often than exact match because of the leniency of the matching protocol. Okay, so we're on step three now. So once Google has decided what keywords are going to match this person's search, there could be a problem. And that's where step three comes in. When deciding between multiple eligible keywords from the same account or linked accounts, the system prioritizes eligible keywords that are identical to the search term. Okay, so Google prioritizes what matches the same word order and context of. Well, not context. That's the wrong word. The same word order. Just gonna go with that same word order of the person's search. So if you have a keyword that matches that person's search exactly, that's going to prioritize that in the list. So immediately, once they grab, let's say, five or six different keywords that could show for this, it's immediately going to pull the ones to the top that match that search, that search the most. Okay, so we went from a person's search that's interpreted, and now we're at the point where there's a bunch of keywords lined up. Some are first priority, and everything else falls below that. Okay, now this is very important. What we're going to get into now is how Google understands language and intent. Because this is important, because if you, if you realize the keyword that someone searched on Google is not words to Google, it is language and intent. There's expectations behind that search. So we need to know, how does Google understand that search and then match it to your keywords. All right, so basically the documentation goes through and said says things have changed. Okay, I'm not going to talk about that. We all know things change, so blah, blah, blah, we're going to skip and we're going to this very important part. Keyword matching in Google Ads has evolved similarly. We used to match searches on keywords based on syntax. In other words, matching the specific words within each search used to. Right. This was pre2020, essentially. Now the same technology that's used to understand the search intent is employed. Keyword matching. Do you understand what's happening when you put a keyword into Google? The same system interprets that keyword, that interprets the person's search. So you can imagine everything's being translated into Google Speak. The. The algorithm, the system reads both, converts it into its own understanding of what that means, and then decides, does that match? Just because the keywords are the same, that does not necessarily mean that Google is going to consider those to be a match. So what Google says is that's how we match user searches to keywords based on semantics. The meaning conveyed by the search, not syntax, are not just syntax. I should say syntax does matter, but semantics matters as well. The meaning behind it. Okay, so here's the important part. So now you understand that just the order is not what's determined, it is also the meaning behind it. So if that's important, we need to know, when does Google get beyond the scope of what we understand to be semantics? And that's very important. When does semantics suddenly become something that we wouldn't necessarily grasp, that we wouldn't necessarily see ourselves? And Google tells us right here, when you use Broad Match, the system looks at additional signals in your account to match more relevant traffic. This means Google's looking at your landing pages, the other keywords in your ad group, previous searches from the user, and more, they say, and more like we all aren't really wanting to know what that more is. I'd love to know, but they just say, and more. You know, I don't know if it's just something that's meaningless or if it's potentially very meaningful and they just won't tell us. So let me restate this. Google translates your keyword into the way they understand it. Google translates the way the person searches and put it into the way they understand it. And if you're using Broad Match, not only do they look at your keyword, they look at your landing page, other keywords in the ad group, and they also look at previous searches from the user and more on top of that. So the take home message so far is this. You think you're building a Google Ads campaign and you're being very meticulous about. I'm going to use this word and I'm going to use this word. Google's trying to tell you, great, we don't use your words, we use a little bit of syntax and we use semantics at the same time. So it's immediately diluting the way that our brains kind of work on. I put this keyword in, I'm going to get this keyword. No, you're not. Google's telling you no, you're not. Okay, let's continue on a couple more steps until the final process ends in Google Ads and the ad finally shows step four. In each ad group that has an eligible keyword, the responsive search ads system automatically assembles the best performing creative. So it's now chosen all these different keywords. It now assembles ad copy from your responsive search ads. And this is before the system actually decides what your bid is and all of that. It's now assembling these pieces together in step four and then step five. This is when your bids are calculated for use with ad rank. Your bids are now calculated. Okay, and this is where smart bidding comes in in play. And for a favorite of mine, manual bidding. All right, so with manual bidding is very straightforward. There's a static bid and it uses that static bid to decide what the bid is. With smart bidding, there's a whole lot more that happens that you just don't see. It uses data from across your account to, to predict performance. It's not limited to a single keyword or campaign. It's based on, you know, how likely the ad with the landing page to the user will result in a conversion. Right. It's in other words, it's complicated. Right, which is fine. We know that it works most times, sometimes half and half, I don't know. Alright, so now we're at the point keywords have been chosen, ad copy has been decided, bids have been calculated. Now step six. The system selects the best combination of relevance and ad rank among the ad candidates considered in consideration. Okay, so these candidates consist of a matched keyword, landing page, creative and a bid. All right, so now all these different accounts come in and they all have these points assembled and now they're going to be ranked according to ad rank. Okay, this is very important because this is how you know, how Google decides how you're going to be placed. And it's certainly very Important on the previous steps, because if you got everything else wrong, this will absolutely show you on the wrong kind of search. Right, so now we get to the final steps. Google says the ad with the highest ad rank from each advertiser that enters into the auction is shown. The ad with the highest ad rank from each advertiser then enters into the auction. Sorry, I think I read that wrong. So all your different possible keywords that can show Google's going to choose one winner and it takes with it an ad that is then entered into the auction in step seven. And then the auction runs, and whoever has the highest ad rank, which is your bid times your quality score, whoever has the highest ad rank gets to be first and everybody else is ranked after that. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay, that is how Google Ads works. Google looks at the person's search, interprets it, translates it, Google looks at your keywords, interprets it, translates it, and then prioritizes what keywords to use and then puts an ad together, calculates what kind of bid you should be using, puts all those elements together, and then it's put up against all the other advertisers and your ad is shown in ranking according to everybody else. Very important to understand because if you are assuming that Google Ads is a simple system of put the word in, put a bid on it, get the traffic, it's not that simple because you're putting a word in, it's translated, then Google's running a lot of other stuff on top of that before your ads ever shown. So hopefully this has been helpful to you to understand the basics of just how Google Ads keyword matching works, how the whole ranking system works, how your ad goes from no impressions to its first impression, how the very first impression shows, and why that ad is chosen. It's a very dynamic process that's changed over the years. The best way to describe it is it used to be static, and now it's not static anymore. It's very dynamic. It's, you know, approaching something much more organic almost. You know, it's. It's constantly changing and becoming a different thing entirely compared to what it used to be. So you have to change and adapt. So if you're having trouble with your Google Ads, hopefully this has been helpful. Get back to basics. If you'd like to dive deeper into this and want me to take a look at your account, you can reach out to me@chrisshafer.com I do audits on accounts and I do live consulting to look at your account with you and go through it or I offer you say, Kris, I'm done with it all. Just manage it for me. Sick of it. I need. I need some real success. Happy to provide whatever help I can. You can find me at chrisha. Com. Thank you guys for being here. I'll catch you next week.