Matthew Ceran

A leader in customer acquisition & growth hacking strategy, Matthew Ceran & his firm 565 Media have helped a wide range of valuable, innovative venture-backed startups such as Robinhood, Indiegogo, Hungryroot, Cleanly, Handy & Makespace efficiently scale their digital marketing mix cost-effectively.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Matthew’s success

Interpreting search term results and taking effective action

Result if you follow the steps in Matthew’s session

Greater account health, better control of keywords and potential for improved results

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

At a high level, any search engine marketing account, you know, you’re gonna have your brand versus your own brand keywords in general, right.

And just to kind of take a step back, your brand keywords are the keywords that relate to your, the name of your business, the slogans, way of your business, the products that you sell your business by name.

And unbranded are the sort of categories that you sell within. So these are things more general.

So for example, if you’re selling shoes, and your company is called Zappos, we use them as an example. And your brand terms would be you know, Zappos, Sappho, shoes, things along those lines, you’re on brand terms, be more like shoes, you know, heels, wedges, boots, all the things that sort of like categories that you’re selling at a high level.

And, you know, when it comes to keywords, there are, you know, sort of short tail and long tail keywords, which we’ll get more into, I’m sure in this interview.

And, you know, when you’re bidding inside of your search engine marketing platform, be AdWords or Bing, or wherever you’re bidding, you’re gonna be bidding on keywords, right, and a match type, which is sort of the most basic element of a search marketing campaign.

And keep in mind, the keywords are just a sort of a net you’re casting to then bid on showing an ad for the variance of the keywords that you’re bidding on that depending on the match type, right?

So match type, there’s broad, there’s phrase, there’s exact to the high level, and some other derivatives, but those are the primary ones. And that’s what specifies how wide your net is.

So if you’re bidding on shoes exact, you’re going to have, you’re going to basically show an ad for the word shoes each time or very similar derivative shoes. Shoes, that sort of thing.

If it’s, you know, phrase match, it’s going to open it up a bit more, you’re going to get other keywords, like maybe, you know, cheap shoes, buy shoes, now those sort of things, and if you go too broad, you’re going to get very wide range of keywords coming in a lot of erroneous, you know, keywords that you might not be really interested in bidding on will be caught. And that’s kind of where search term reports and harvesting comes in.

So, you know, obviously you’re bidding on certain keywords depending on your match type. Your net is catching a lot of bycatch, as I put it, and your search and reports are going to help you figure out exactly which of that bycatch is valuable to your company over time, that will produce the sort of return or or goals that you’re looking for. And which portion of that net is wasted by cash that you can then you know, optimize out of your neck.

So search terms are exactly what the user has typed into their browser, into Google and Bing, and what should not be confused with their keyword, which is the strategy that you’re using to cast these nets, to then show ads to people on these search marketing platforms.

So that’s kind of what search terms are at a high level there. They are the exact terms that people are typing into their browser when they’re surfacing your ads.