If you use Google Adwords or one of the other major pay-per-click programs, don’t throw money away paying for useless visitors to your site.  If you use “Broad Match” or “Phrase Match” as a keyword matching option, make sure you know what kind of searchers these options are sending you, versus “Exact Match” where you know exactly what the searcher is looking for (an exact match to your keywords).

Let’s say your online store sells baby products. Let’s say you think you are bidding on searchers who are looking for “Baby Outfits”. If you use the Broad Match keyword matching option, for the phrase “Baby Outfits,”  you might be paying for visitors to your site who are looking for the following things:

• how to make baby outfits
• cheap baby outfits
• baby outfit patterns
• baby outfit stores in Reno
• baby gorilla Halloween outfits
• outfits selling those baby cheese things

You get the picture. Broad match can be really broad. Yes, you can add Negative Keywords to your list to block words like “cheap.” But can you really block all the possible permutations that people might be looking for? Probably not. And you may not want to pay for most of these people to come visit your site. They’re never going to buy anything from you.

In Google Adwords, here’s how to check which search terms are sending visitors to your site. Go to your Ad Group dashboard. Click the “Keywords” tab. Then click the button called “See Search Terms”. Voila: set the time period you want to review, and you can see exactly what terms you have been paying for, including Broad Match and Phrase Match. It may be an eye-opener.