For the beginner, developing a successful online advertising and digital marketing strategy may seem overwhelming. Between finding your niches, testing out variations of your campaign and having the finances necessary to run a consistent advertising effort, it is no wonder that a majority of blogs and websites end in failure. It takes a certain amount of dedication to follow through with a blog or website, and advertising efforts are a crucial part of that. If you are considering a PPC (pay per click) campaign but do not know where to start, continue reading to find out how you can begin your first ad campaign via Google AdWords and how keywords are incorporated into this process.

Building a Keywords List

The first part of developing a successful PPC campaign via Google AdWords is finding a series of keywords in which you want your campaign to be featured. This means that whenever someone searches for a particular query that is part of your campaign, your ad will be shown to the user alongside other related advertisements. Knowing exactly who you are trying to target and what are the best keywords for any particular brand will take some research and a bit of trial and error, but pinging URLs to your various pages and products require a substantial amount of keywords in order to be effective.

Determining Match Types

With your list of keywords in hand, it is now time to specify to Google AdWords how you want these keywords grouped. AdWords offers three ways to do this: exact, phrase and broad. By default, broad will be the selected option: this means Google will show your advertisements to people who search not only for your keywords, but slight variations as well. Specifying phrase will make it where only an exact search for the query will result in your ad being displayed, which is perfect for longer keywords (“where to buy leather belts online”). Exact match works similarly to phrase matching, but is used only when the keyword or phrase consists of just one word (“football”).

Find Additional Keywords

With your keywords uploaded and categorized, you now can use Google AdWords to find other keywords and phrases that you may have missed. At the top of the keywords page, you will see a green button labelled ‘Add keywords’. This is just one of many features crammed into AdWords to help you find additional opportunities for advertising: by understanding the links between various keywords and groups, Google can suggest relevant keywords that often result in similar search results for users. Having this information will allow you to create a more well-rounded PPC campaign and reach the intended audience.

Conclusion

By now, you will be ready to place bids for your campaigns and begin monitoring the results. Using keywords in a pay per click campaign is not just about pinging URLs to search users, but about building your brand with the relevant audience. By creating a list of valuable keywords, organizing them by category and promoting them exact, phrase and broad-type search campaigns, you will be able to stretch your dollar via AdWords and achieve the return on investment you seek.