Keyword match type plays a critical role in controlling the budget when undertaking Google Ads campaigns. A keyword match type that you select influences the click through rate, the level of relevancy, and the cost per click. This article will provide you with clear and concise examples of using Exact Match and Broad Match keywords, and when to use them. Furthermore, we’ll touch upon Negative Match Types, ways of selecting keywords for PPC and SEO campaigns, as well as the benefits of using multiple types of keywords simultaneously.
What Are Keyword Match Types in Google Ads?
Google Ads provides many match types that dictate how closely the search query must match your keyword before activating your ad. These match types vary from close to phrase, to broad, enabling you grant control in the kind of ads that you desire. Let’s break down the three primary match types used in Google Ads campaigns:
1. Broad Match Keywords
Broad match is the default setting of keywords when placing an advertisement on Google Ads. This match type provides even the greater degree of exposure since this allows your ad to be displayed to anyone using a query relevant to your keyword, including the similar, phrase, and even the misspelled word. As such it provides maximum visibility but sends a low quality traffic that may be not relevant to the ad.
Benefits of Broad Match:
- Wider reach: Its reach is that of a larger audience your advertorial will be view.
- Automatic variations: Google also tends to link keywords with closely related or related keywords.
- Flexibility: Kind of good if you want to capture a wide array of searches.
Drawbacks of Broad Match:
- Less control: The ads may turn up for a wrong search phrase.
- Higher costs: With the given larger audience, it is possible that one pays for clicks without the corresponding conversions.
2. Phrase Match Keywords
Phrase match enables the placing of your ad in the context where the character string is placed, and the string entered by the user as a search term matches the exact phrase or its close occurrence with the addition of other terms before or after it. However, it is more controlled than broad match, but gives advertisers some leeway regarding keywords to be matched.
Benefits of Phrase Match:
- Balanced reach: Used more than broad match yet is more managed than the broad match type.
- Relevant traffic: More effective than broad match in relation to the kind of search terms it covers.
- Slight flexibility: This retains close searches of the keyword and offers mean more preference in the kind of query that is made.
Drawbacks of Phrase Match:
- Less control: However, the words can be added to the query, and occasionally, can be meaningless to everything around the user.
- Potentially higher CPC: Since it’s more specific than broad match the prices for AdWords might be higher, due to a more significant level of competition.
3. Exact Match Keywords
There is the exact match is the most narrow matching option in which your ad is only displayed to the users who are typing the search word or phrase absolutely similar to the keyword or very close to it. Similarity Category includes exact match keywords, world’s synonyms, prefix postfix keywords and close variation keywords minor changes like as singular/plural forms, spell mistake, word order etc.
Benefits of Exact Match:
- Highly targeted: They show only when a person will type in specific queries.
- Cost-effective: As a rule, exact matching keywords are cheaper because they are relevant to the query.
- Better conversion rates: This is basically true because the search query is relevant and therefore the chances of conversion are high.
Drawbacks of Exact Match:
- Limited reach: Your ad may not appear for the related searches that may be a potential lead to you.
- Missed opportunities: This means that you may lose useful traffic from variations of your exact keyword.
Negative Keyword Match Types
Beyond the basic options of broad, phrase, and exact match keywords defining where the ads are placed, negative keywords focus on where the ads are not placed. The use of negative keywords enables you to avoid making your ads pop up in searches you don’t want your site to be associated with.
Negative keywords are applied to the context, which the user doesn’t want to match to the ad. For instance, if your business involves in selling luxury shoes, you move “cheap” or “discount” as negative keywords in order not to attract price-sensitive customers.
Benefits of Negative Keywords:
- Increased efficiency: You do not pay for the traffic which revolves around your site without real potential clients clicking on it or interested in your services or product, therefore cutting on your expenses.
- Better targeting: Alongside, makes it possible for your ads to be placed for more relevant search terms.
- Improved ROI: This way you are able to refine the traffic and this is beneficial for improving your return on investment.
Keyword Matching and Selecting the Proper Match Types of Your Campaign
The decision regarding the choice of keyword match type mainly depends on your intended objective of the campaign and your budget. If your aims consist of lifting brand awareness and your budget is somewhat fluid, broad match will likely do for you. However, if you are more concerned about the quality of leads, and the costs involved then, perhaps exact match keywords should be preferred.
Key Considerations:
- Target audience: Determine such level of specificity in keyword search by the target population.
- Budget: The most important thing to note for those operating on a tight budget is the fact that exact or phrase match may be useful in cutting costs but reaching your target audience at the same time.
- Campaign objectives: Select broad match during the early stages of the campaign and when the objective is to generate brand awareness, on the other hand, use exact match to target audiences with high buying potential and high website visit intention.
Combining Match Types for High Impact
Google Ads can provide great results if you use different types of match options while showing your ads, thus you can always achieve a balance between the campaigns’ coverage and effectiveness. smarter bidding strategies could also help to identify the best match types in support of different objectives of the campaign. By using different match types in your campaigns you are able to cover large and broad and niche and high-converting keywords.
Recommended Strategy:
- The type of match to use for trying out new keywords to the market and target more people.
- Simplified phrase match for the medium level of the target population coverage and the close proximity of the ads to the target audience’s interests.
- Rather than flooding an industry with a blanket keyword that will yield a large volume of traffic, But that will attract a lot of unqualified traffic and cost money, exact match for targeting the most potential customers.
- The idea here is to place all these match types in a sequence that would bring the targeted audience the highest visibility possible but with the assurance of controlling your ad spend as much as possible.
How to Identify Keywords for PPC and SEO
It is very important to determine which keywords appeal to the target niche for PPC advertising and for optimizing a website for search engine results. However, there are some differences in the way of how keywords are defined, between both strategies, which are aimed on targeting definite search queries.
Keyword Research for PPC:
Popular sources such as Google Keyword Planner can be used to find attractive and relevant keywords for the site.
- Analyze competitor ads: In addition to this, you should also investigate what your competitors are bidding to ensure you find any opportunities.
- Focus on intent: It is always important to understand the purpose of the keywords to decide whether to use the broad, phrase or exact match.
Keyword Research for SEO:
- Utilize Google Search Console: You are also able to discover which keywords your website is already ranking for in case you need to optimize them.
- To find long-tail keywords, it’s important to use SEO tools such as SEM or Ahrefs and perform the keyword analysis.
- Consider user intent: They recommended using the keywords that the target audience is likely to search in order to optimize the content.
Tip: So, when you connect both your PPC and SEO approaches, you gain much more in terms of keywords and your paid and non-paid rankings.
Conclusion
Overall, keyword matching options are important to understand how your ads perform and which matching type will make your Google Ads campaign more effective in terms of reaching a wider audience and saving on your budget. Broad match is to cover all possible keywords and phrases that may be related to your ad or product, phrase match is to display the ad in cases close in context to the keywords entered and exact match is, well, when the keywords entered must match precisely. Additionally, approaching the goal of creating an efficient advertising campaign, one has to use negative keywords, as well as combine different match types into one Google Ads campaign.
Final Words
Google Ads: there isn’t a clear answer to this question. Hence keyword match type depends with several factors like goals and objectives of your campaign, the audience as well as the amount of money you are willing to spend. Reading through this article should help you realize that it’s okay not to have the perfect balance and that it is crucial to test and tinker with your strategy to arrive at the best balance. So, I created the project with phrase, broad and exact keywords, and bidding strategy, along with using negative keywords, I don’t see any problems in running Google Ads.
