Keyword and Placement Tips

The more relevant your keywords and placements are to your goals, the more easily you can reach your potential customers.

Choose your keywords carefully
Include specific keywords that directly relate to the specific theme of your ad group and landing page. For optimal ad visibility, include relevant keyword variations, along with singular and plural versions. If applicable, consider using colloquial terms, alternate spellings, synonyms, and product or serial numbers. A keyword generation tool can help generate lists of possible keywords.

Take advantage of keyword matching options
With some keywords, you’ll get more ad impressions; with others, you’ll get fewer impressions but potentially more clicks. By strategically using keyword matching options, you can reach the most appropriate prospects, potentially reduce your actual CPC or CPM, and increase your ROI. Use broad match to capture relevant traffic on variations of your keyword, such as longer queries, plurals, synonyms, or different spellings.

Use placement-targeted campaigns
Placements are locations on the Display Network where your ad can appear. With placement-targeting, you can choose individual spots on the Display Network to show your ads (called managed placements) or simply let your media channel’s ad targeting display your ads on the website pages most relevant to your products and services (automatic placements).

When using managed placements, you can do the following to make sure your ads are relevantly targeted to the right content on the right sites:

- Exclude placements if you don’t want your ads to appear on them at all.

- Manage individual or default bids to adjust how competitive you want to be on certain placements.

- Add keywords and negative keywords to refine where your ads run.

- See URL-level details on the placements where your ads appear and quickly make data-driven decisions to improve your ad group’s performance.

Choose your placements carefully
Include websites and other placements that are relevant to your products or services, and be sure to choose enough of them. The more relevant the placements you target, the better the chances your ad will show.

When using the Placement Tool to find and select websites, pay attention to the Ad Formats column in the list of available placements. If you run only certain kinds of formats — for instance, image ads only, or text and video ads only — make sure you select placements that run the kinds of formats you have to offer.