Google offers three different match types: broad, phrase, and exact; negatives are kind of like a fourth, but not really the same as the other three. As I mentioned in an earlier post, broad match is good for keyword discovery but requires spending time to find and use negatives to eliminate irrelevant search queries, and exact match is good for conversion rates and per-click costs but not for finding queries that could become new keywords to bid on. So, what is phrase match good for?

Well, phrase match is excellent for expanding your keyword inventory to include basic grammatical variations, especially plurals – without having to add them one by one as exact matches, or worry about using negatives with a broad match. That’s because phrase match means that only search queries that contain your keywords in the exact order you entered them will trigger your ads. Often plurals are created by simply adding the letter ‘s’ to the end of a word, so they qualify for phrase match - of course there are some exceptions like "woman / women". Basic grammatical variants like adding the word ‘got’ or ‘buy’ in front of a term also qualify.

This is nice because broad match is very, very broad - it can cause your ad to be displayed for plurals, misspelling, synonyms, specific types of a general thing, etc. In other words, broad match can cause your ads to be displayed for keywords that may be completely irrelevant to your business. That’s because the search engines’ agenda is to maximize their own profits – which means more advertisers bidding on more keywords at higher prices – so they try to make it easy for you to discover new keywords, but they’re not as concerned as you are about the relevancy of the ‘discovered’ keywords. Of course, your agenda is to maximize your own profits by finding relevant keywords. So it’s not like the search engine technology is bad or they’re trying to mislead you; they just have a slightly different agenda.

So, if all you want to do is make sure you’re bidding on the basic variations of your keywords, broad match is overkill - use phrase match to save yourself some time.

###

About the Author

Daryl Michalik is a product manager responsible for Lyris HQ Search Marketing and client services. He has over 6 years of experience in online marketing and Web analytics, plus a background in strategic marketing, financial analysis and product marketing.

Related Resources:

• Subscribe to Inside Lyris HQ our monthly online-marketing newsletter.
• Download free online-marketing guides, tools and webinars in the Lyris Online-Marketing Resource Center.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment