Can You Make Sense Of Match Types?

Posted by: Date: October 21, 2008

by Diana Adams

I’ve previously written Paid Search Advertising Roadmap, Paid Search Rules and Alphabet Soup and PPC. Now let’s start looking at keyword matching.

Keyword match types
Each of the three major PPC platforms follow a similar approach, with Google AdWords and MSN adCenter using essentially identical match types and Yahoo! Search Marketing being a little more confusing. If you can get your head around the different terminology in the three platforms then you’re going to be just fine.

The match types are:

Broad match: if your term is anywhere in the search term your ad shows
“Phrase” match: words you bid on have to be in the same order they’re searched
[Exact] match: the ad displays if the searcher uses only the exact words bid on, in the exact order you bid on them.

Here’s an example of how these match types might work with different search phrases:

Because Yahoo! uses different terminology, I made this little chart that helped me understand much more clearly:

How you use the match types is going to affect how many impressions you get and your click through rate. Broad match gets the greatest number of impressions, because the terms you’re bidding on can appear anywhere in the searched phrase, yet broad match is going to have the lowest (relative) click through rate because your ad may not be relevant.

Using the an example of someone searching for cloth baby doll diapers, and you had bid broad match on ‘cloth baby diapers’ your ad would display. But since your ad doesn’t say anything about dolls, you’re less likely to get the click (hopefully). Phrase match will get a lower number of impressions, because the search phrase must match the phrase you’ve bid on, but it will get a better click through rate for the same reason. Exact match terms have the lowest impression rate, yet are inclined to have the highest click through rate.

Remember too that the higher your click through rate, the better the quality score, and the less you pay per click. A very good thing to remember. If it’s volume you’re after, broad match is your answer. When you want to fine tune the clicks you pay for, start using phrase and exact match terms.

Another very important thing to remember is that Google uses “expanded broad match,” which means they can decide to show your ad for pretty much anything they think might be relevant. I had bid on a broad match term of “plastic cards” and Google started showing my ad (and people clicked!) for the search “toy cars.” Make any sense to you? — Me either — That was when I started really vamping up on my negative keywords. Negative keywords deserves a post all to itself but I’ll touch briefly on them here.

Negative Keywords
Basically a negative keyword list is used to prevent your ads from displaying. I added the phrase toy car as a negative to the ad group for plastic cards and solved that problem. Using “free” as a negative is an excellent example. If you don’t give away free stuff, you don’t want to pay for clicks of people who are searching for free stuff. Using the cloth baby diapers example, you also may not want to pay for clicks when someone is looking for “cloth baby doll diapers”. In that case, use “doll” as the negative and your ad won’t display. You can use broad, phrase and exact matching for your negatives too, but like I said, keyword negatives deserve their very own post. In that post we’ll look at how to create a hefty list of negative keywords.

If you’re going to use Broad match, use tons, and I mean tons of negative keywords.

Now the BIG trick is to learn where to go to change/set the match types because AdWords, Yahoo and MSN are all very different. More on that next time …

Check out our small business news site.