Be an experienced practitioner or professional, while setting up an Adwords campaign the keywords and their match type are always a big question for many. Keyword match type management is the very vital not only to improve you quality score, but at the same time it helps you to reach the real audience which increases the ROI.
Choosing the right keyword for your Adwords campaign is the very basic requirement for success of your campaign. Right keywords and the effective bidding make or break any PPC campaign.
When you bid or add keywords in a PPC ad campaign, you need to select the match type of the keywords, which actually tells Google how broadly or restrictively match to the search terms to trigger the ads.
In this tutorial, I’ll help you learn the keyword match types and how they differ from each other and how to use them in your campaign.
Each keyword you add to your Adgroup has an option to use a matching type to help control which search terms should trigger your ad to show.
What are the keyword match types in Ads?
When creating a text ad in your AdWords PPC campaign, keywords match are the sectionalization of the keywords depending on the ads they trigger for a search term. Basically there are 4 types of the keywords such as: broad match, modified broad match, phrase match, or exact match.
Now discuss each of them types one by one…
Broad Match:
By default the keywords when added to an adgroup are broad match type; i.e if you don’t specify a particular matching option, the keywords are considered as broad match.
With the default broad match type you can reach wide range of audience with wide variation of search terms. That is because, the broad match type keywords allow the ads to trigger for closely related, synonyms, singular and plural forms, possible misspellings, stemmings (such as clean and cleaning), and other relevant variations of the added main keywords.
For example, if you use a broad match keyword “kittens,” to your campaign, your ad will be displayed for the search terms like “kitten”, “kittens”, “kitten photos”, “kitten images”, “adopt a kitten”, “white kitten”, “kitten calendars”,
Sometimes the broad match keywords also trigger ads for the terms that are not even included in your search term. The search term “expensive vehicles” could trigger an ad for the broad match keyword “luxury cars”, which is a relative variant for the keyword.
Modified Broad Match
The keyword type broad match modifier is the middle between the restrictive search and broad search which allow ads to trigger for the search terms that are close variant and must include the term within the search terms. The individual words are locked by using parameter “+” before the word.
For instance for the broad modified mathch “+Lead batteries”, it will show the ads for the search terms such as lead batteries, lead battery, lead cell, lead dry cell etc…
Similarly for the broad modified match “ lead +batteries”, it will show the ads for the search terms “lead bateries”, “batteries”, “lithium batteries”, “rechargeable batteries” etc..
Phrase Match Type
The Phrase match type keywords offer a better control over the search terms that could trigger your ads. Like the broad modified keywords it provides a better control over the search terms. Here the ads will only show when the search term has the exact match but other words are accepted either before or after the included keyword. Here the parameter used is inverted commas (“ keyword”).
Phrase match allows your ad to show only for searches that include the exact phrase, or close variations of that exact phrase, with additional words before or after.
For example, if your key phrase is “dog supplier,” your ad could will when a user searches for “dog supplier,” “discount dog supplier,” or ” wholesale dog supplier”, “pet dog supplier” but not for searches like “pet food,” “pet bird supplies,” or “art supplies.”
Exact match
With exact match, you have the maximum control over your keywords. Exact match type keywords are the most specific and restrictive in nature. Here the ads appear for those keywords that are exactly same as the keyword added to your campaign. So, users can only see your ad when they type your exact keyword phrase by itself.
your ads can appear only when someone searches for your exact keyword, without any other terms in the search. We’ll also show your ad when someone searches for close variations of that specific keyword. Here the parameter used is square brackets[keywords].
For instance if you have added the keyword [women’s hats] to your campaign, the ads will show for the terms “women’s hats”, “woman’s hats”. But not for buy women’s hats or women’s hats on sale.
How keyword matching options help you?
The main aim with the keywords matching options is to give an advertiser full control of the keywords that triggers his ads. In the mean time you can use the search term report and track you keyword variation that showed your ads.
Google always recommend using broad match keywords to maximize your impressions but that actually makes you lose your money as with the broad match keywords you reach many irrelevant visits too.
In general, with broad keywords you reach more audience, but with narrow keyword/exact math keywords you reach real customers or the most relevant customers and hence better return in investment.
As per the recent updates, Google has introduced 4 types of keyword match management in Google adwords such as Broad, Modified Broad, Phrase, Exact Match Keywords.
Your Turn
It is very important to work on the optimization of the AdWords keyword match types because it allows you to reach your target audience while downsizing the unnecessary spend on irrelevant clicks on your campaign. Also with a better strategy you can optimize the keyword match types to increase conversions rate at a very high ROI.
