Properly mapping your Google Ads match types can be the key to fully unlocking your PPC potential in search.
Unfortunately, Google likes to advocate the use of broad keywords in an effort to map to the most impressions possible. This is not inherently a bad thing if you are effectively using other match types to minimize your spend risk, while capturing adequate volume.
There’s always a balance.
To begin, let’s look at the match types that are currently available in your account.
There are 4 main Google Ads match types:
- Exact = [tennis shoes]
- Phrase = “tennis shoes “
- Broad = tennis shoes
- Modified Broad = +tennis +shoes
Subscribe to Trent’s newsletter to stay up to date on all the latest performance marketing posts.
We typically try to steer clear of all broad Google Ads match types unless there is room to efficiently scale because they tend to map to an abundance of keywords that may not be as relevant for your business. If we do find broad keywords in the account that are delivering conversions to the business, then we try to extract the converting terms using search term reports and then we add them back in as exact or phrase keywords until the broad keyword loses its volume.
The 3 main match types we like focus on for control sake include exact, phrase, and modified broad.
Exact match types map your keywords to searches where the search term is the exact term or close variant.
Phrase match types map your keywords to searches that include the phrase or close variant of the phrase in your keyword in the order of how you place them in the account.
Modified broad match types match your keywords to any search term that contains the keyword regardless of the order of how you place them in the account.
For a full breakdown of Google Ads match types visit Google’s support center.
A simplified diagram may help show these distinctions a bit more clearly:
As you can see, the less targeted the keyword match type is (modified broad as opposed to phrase or exact), the more potential impressions you can serve for.
The issue that we regularly see, however, is that advertisers have a large portion of their advertising spend in broad or modified broad keywords, which may be a good thing if you’re trying to drive volume, but it may hinder performance as less relevant clicks accumulate cost.
Example: how to tie shoes for tennis compared to best tennis shoes
As mentioned, a good rule of thumb is to extract what is working from the broad, modified broad, and phrase keywords using the search term report and then adding them back in as exact keywords to bid on them more aggressively. This allows you to control costs while targeting the most efficient keywords for your business.
Creating a clean and healthy Google Ads account structure can help you scale this strategy with ease.
Another issue we often find that is the use or misuse of negative keywords. Negative keywords are a way to tell the search engine to not show search terms for specific keywords you are trying to target.
For example, let’s say you notice an abundance of “how to” or “price” related search terms that are mapping to your modified broad and phrase keywords. You can add “how to” and “price” into your account as negatives to stop serving ads for any search term related to those variants.
To add negatives to a specific campaign or ad group, navigate to the ad group you want to block potential impressions on, click into the Keywords tab and select Negative Keywords.
OLD GOOGLE ADS VERSION:
NEW GOOGLE ADS VERSION:
A more advanced strategy would be to build your ad group structure based on the specific Google Ads match types mentioned above, then negative out the related variants to ensure impressions are mapping to your most relevant terms.
For example, let’s say you notice the exact term [best tennis shoes] is a top converter for you and you want to expand your coverage on that keyword.
You can create phrase and modified broad ad groups beneath it and then negative out the exact term [best tennis shoes] in those ad groups to keep the exact impressions within your exact ad group.
An updated diagram with lower tiered negatives would look like this:
This level of granularity works best on large PPC accounts with key head terms that make up a bulk of the volume. Lastly, you can use the modified broad and phrase keywords to mine for new top converters over time.
Continual keyword mining is an effective strategy to grow your keyword amount while retaining ad relevance, which is a key component of quality score.
We have found the most success when we leverage Google Ads match types to extract the top converters from broad, modified broad, and phrase keywords and then add them back into the account as exact keywords. We then bid the exact, most relevant keywords more aggressively than the others, implement proper negatives on the lower tiered ad groups for proper impression allocation, and continually ran search term reports to find new keywords to grow the account with.
Subscribe to Trent’s newsletter to stay up to date on all the latest performance marketing posts.
Continue Reading: HOW TO SETUP GOOGLE ADS A/B TESTS FOR PPC IMPROVEMENTS