Google Ads Keyword Match Types

Key Takeaways

keywords are the foundation of every google ad search campaigns and match types tell google how you want your keywords to function now over the past few years we've had a number of different changes to match types we've had new ones created the functionality change some go away but the most important piece is that you know how the match types work when you are setting up your campaigns so while i don't expect this video to stand the test of time i do think it's important for us to have a snapshot of how the match types work as of right now so in this video i'm going to give you an overview of the existing match types on google ads talk about how each of them works and then give some ideas for when you might want to use each since we're going over the functionality and the annotation of the different keyword math types the entirety of this video is actually just going to be in powerpoint it's going to be a little bit easier to illustrate the differences here than it will be in the google ads interface the first thing i want to cover is what the match types are there are going to be three different ones and as you can see in this graphic from google they have different degrees of specificity the first one on the left you'll see at the bottom it says loose matching is going to be broad match this is where your ads may show on searches that relate to your keyword the slightly more specific is going to be in the middle with moderate matching and that's phrase match ads that may show on searches that include the meaning of your keyword and then all the way to the right is going to be exact match and that is going to be type matching where ads may show on searches that are the same meaning as your keyword these are quite a bit different than they used to be in the past if you have been running ads on google ads for a long time maybe even back to when you called it adwords you're probably thinking that phrase match should match exactly to everything that is within the quotation marks that is no longer the case same thing with exact match exact is no longer exact its exact ish as some of our friends in the ppc space like to call it the thing i find funny about this graphic is that broad match easily matches to the most different types of keywords and yet they only give one example as to what it would match to on this graphic so rather than continue to use this graphic i'm going to use different images that google uses to explain more in depth each of the different match types but first i want to start off with a high level piece that i've already talked about a little bit that's the annotation of the different match types so the keyword from the previous example was lawn mowing service i changed it to lawn mowing services because i just got it wrong for each of the different match types there are different types of symbols that you will use to designate which match type you want google ads to use that keyword as if it's going to be broad match you just leave it alone there's no marks around it it looks exactly the same as if you are writing it in a sentence phrase match uses the quotation marks around your keyword you have to have the quotes around the entire keyword you could not have the first set of open quotations in front of lawn and then they close after mowing and then add services afterward that will default to a broad match keyword because google will not recognize it and then exact uses the brace annotations so you open with an open brace and you close with a closed brace same as with phrase match those braces have to be on the very beginning and very end of the keyword they can't be throughout the middle to focus on a specific area so with that let's go into a few more examples of the keyword match types with those other graphics i talked about from google and we're going to go in reverse order this time we're going to start with the most specific exact match here we've changed up the example a bit now we're using shoes for men and that's going to be in the brace in the example on the left your ads may show for shoes men men's shoes men shoe shoes for a man all of those different types of variants probably are people looking for shoes for a man so much so that i even just use their last example in a sentence these are going to be the types of queries that your ads will show to if you use exact match keywords on the right you'll see some examples that your ads won't show for men's tennis shoes or shoes for boys and i apologize these graphics that they put together for these individual match types has some very weird spacing in it so even though it says shoes for be always it's supposed to be boys so you can see here that google is saying that it can tell a difference between men and boys but it also is going to designate a difference between people just looking for shoes and people looking for men's tennis shoes which will be different according to google phrase match is going to have a little bit more of a loose interpretation so the phrase match keyword is going to just be tennis shoes so your ads will show for shoes for tennis buy tennis shoes on sale red tennis shoes comfortable tennis sneakers so you can see here that most of these still have the word tennis and shoes in the terms but they have substituted sneakers the order is a bit different but it's pretty tightly themed to what we're looking for with the tennis shoes keyword your ads will not show for searches like tennis rackets and training shoes and can you wear running shoes for tennis google has decided that those are too far out which i would definitely agree with that and your ads won't show for things like that last is for broad match and now we can see a little bit more of a realistic example of how things would match a low-carb diet plan will match to carb-free foods low-carb diets low-calorie recipes mediterranean diet books and low-carbohydrate dietary program the one that's probably the furthest out there is mediterranean diet books but it's still at least kind of somewhat on task i'll be completely honest about this even these examples are being very generous to how i've seen google broad match match to certain keywords broad match can be very broad in some accounts so they're putting it in the best light that you can see here but this does give you an idea of how much further it will go with broad match compared to phrase and exact there is one other match type that i want to cover that some of you who've been doing this for a while might recognize or that somebody who's taken over an account that's been active for a long time might notice that's broad match modifier so here we have the keyword lawn mowing services like earlier the broad match modifier term is going to be something that has plus marks within the keyword this is where the plus can be in front of all of the words just some of the words or one of the words in the keyword and those were meant to be anchors google actually did away with broad match modifier and rolled it into the phrase match functionality so you can still have broad match modifier keywords active and they will just operate like phrase but you can't create any new ones and you can't edit any of the broad match modifier keywords anymore if you want to learn more about the broad match modifier and phrase match transition from google you can watch the video that we put together at the top of the screen right now but for the rest of this video i really just want to talk through the best practices that we at paid media pros think and follow about different keyword match types the first is going to be to start with exact and phrase match keywords you already saw that exact isn't exactly exact anymore and that phrase match can match to a number of different types of keywords that it couldn't in the past you're already getting more reach with exact and phrase than you used to and because these are more specific we see much better performance out of them than we do with broad match especially when getting started with new campaigns or advertising new products if you're struggling with volume with exact and phrase match keywords you can try a number of different tactics either by adding more phrase and exact match terms just by doing additional keyword research using the keyword planner some competitor tools we have videos on all of those different sorts of things if you want to check those out you could also increase your bids on your individual keywords to get more competitive if you're using manual or enhanced cpc and you can also test automated bidding to try and get more competitive within each of the auctions to make sure that you're capturing enough impression share and that could be the reason why you're not getting as much traction over time if you see strong performance and you really want more volume coming through that's when we would suggest testing broad match and be relatively conservative with it to be quite honest i have a lot to say about utilizing broad match and a lot of cautionary tales for that so we're actually going to put together another video in the coming weeks about best tactics for utilizing broad match in your google ads account so stay tuned for that but there are instances where broad match can be useful we just like to see that we have a good foundation with exact and phrase match keywords already established within the account now the last little bonus piece before i let you go is just a couple pieces of advice for building out new campaigns because we get some common questions once we talk about match types people want to know how to start applying the knowledge in their new campaigns right off the bat the first is that you can go ahead and use exact and phrase to start just like we talked about and then expand to broad as you see fit it doesn't mean that you have to start with just exact and then move to phrase and then use broad i would suggest starting with phrase and exact right off the bat to capture as much specified volume as you can and then second all match types can and should live within the same ad group we might put together another video on this talking about single keyword ad groups and how they used to be useful in the past and that they no longer are but just for the sake of this video take my advice put all of your match types in the same ad group that way all relevant search queries and all similar search queries will find their way into the same ad group and will all show with the same ad copy you won't have to try to figure out where in your account those different search queries are going and making sure that you have the right ad copy matching up to that user's intent overall the match types on google ads are relatively simple but they can have a massive impact on how your search campaigns perform and whether or not you see results from it i highly encourage you to start off with exact and phrase expand to broad if you see good performance again we'll likely have another video on that coming up soon but don't forget that even just the difference between a set of quotation marks or a set of brackets will have a massive impact on what types of queries your ads will show for and whether or not they're relevant to the types of things that you're trying to sell i know i mentioned some videos that might be coming up in future weeks that might answer some questions you have but if you have a question that doesn't relate to those videos or just anything else about keyword match types feel free to leave us a note in the comments below thanks for watching our video if you thought it was useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to get notified of when a new one comes out be sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel you