Compound keywords are often better choices for your PPC campaign. To be effective, keywords must be both contextually and situationally relevant. They should both describe your products & services, and cause your ads to show up on pages that potential customers will actually view. As we noted earlier, if one of your words is too broad, your ads will be wasted on irrelevant pages. Compound keywords may, therefore, be a better choice.

New research into the search habits of search engine users has supported our recommendation that compound keywords are often a better choice. Search Engine Watch reports:

According to data collected from users of European Web analytics provider OneStat, most people use 2- or 3-word queries in search engines. The RankStat research is based on a sample of 2 million visitors, made up of 20,000 visitors in 100 countries each day.

Here's the full breakdown:

1. Two-word phrases -- 28.38 percent
2. Three-word phrases -- 27.15 percent
3. Four-word phrases -- 16.42 percent
4. One-word phrase -- 13.48 percent
5. Five-word phrases -- 8.03 percent
6. Six-word phrases -- 3.67 percent
7. Seven-word phrases -- 1.63 percent
8. Eight-word phrases -- 0.73 percent
9. Nine-word phrases -- 0.34 percent
10. Ten-word phrases -- 0.16 percent

If more than 55% of users are using two- to three-word queries, bidding on the individual keywords that make up the name of your product may not be as important as bidding on the whole name of the product. Of course, when individual keywords are not broad, such as the model of a specific car, individual words may be worth your advertising dollars. For the more restricted advertising budget, though, prudence seems to dictate hedging your bets and putting your money on compound keywords.