Broad, Phrase or Exact Match?

Google Ads has changed so much over the past 12 months. And what's scary is that the largest and most significant change has actually gone underneath the radar in that not many people know the change that has been made or even if they do know, they don't know the full extent of how much this has changed the way that Google Ads now operates. Now I don't know if this was intentional or not, but Google kind of snuck this change in amongst all of the large changes which they advertised heavily, which was removing smart shopping and local campaigns and changing them to their new campaign type being performance max campaigns, removing the ability to edit or add new expanded text ads, forcing you to only use responsive search ads, or by transitioning away from universal analytics to the new reporting system of Google Analytics. 4. These are all very significant changes. However, as I said, they are not the most significant change which has happened in Google Ads in the last 12 months. And that's because the largest and most significant change that has occurred in Google Ads has been that they have changed the way that their keyword targeting works. So in this video I want to give you an overview of what that changes and also show you some real life examples of how much this has changed your Google Ads campaigns, where they're going to discuss which keyword match types you should be using for your campaign. And then finally I'm going to take you through the strategy and the structure updates that you need to doing with your Google Ads search campaigns. Right now. My name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads Master. Now with all of these significant changes that have been happening on the Google Ads platform over the past 12 months, the good news that I can report is is that the core underlining strategy that you need for success in Google Ads hasn't changed. And what I mean by that if you have a regular optimization schedule so you know exactly what you need to be optimizing in your Google Ads account and every 72 hours, every week, every month and every 90 days, you are still well placed for success with your Google Ads campaigns. And to help you with this so that you know exactly what you need to be optimizing every time you jump into your Google Ads account, I want to give you my free Google Ads Optimization checklist and you can grab that right now all you need to do follow that link in the description. But right now let's get into today's teaching. Now as a quick reminder, if you're not aware of the change that Google Ads has made to its Match types. So it's broad match, phrase match and exact match is that Google now doesn't just target the keywords that you enter, especially for those keywords, the enter for your phrase match and your exact match keywords. Because now Google actually assigns a meaning to those keywords, meaning that your exact match keywords are no longer just targeting the exact keywords that you asked Google to target. I get it, it's a bit confusing. So to remove any confusion, let's go and have a look right now what Google explains the changes. But then I want to take you into a real life account to show you that this is actually more significant than what Google is letting us know. Right here is the explanation that Google gave when it started notifying people that they were updating their keyword match types. And it gave the example of lawn mowing service. So if you are using lawn mowing service as a broad match, it would say that it would show your ads or trigger your ads for searches that relate to that keyword. And they give the example of lawn aeration prices. Now that's not the exact same service because we're not talking about lawn mowing, we're talking about lawn aeration. It's a different service, but at least it is still related. And then it would go through the phrase match where it would say that your ads may show on searches that include the meaning of your keyword. And then exact match was, it would only show your ads if Google felt that the two keywords meant the same thing. So they've given an example. If you had an exact match keyword of lawn mowing service, the exact match ad would trigger for search terms like grass cutting service. With the old style, the exact match keyword, this would not happen. But the way that it looks right here, that all looks acceptable. So it looks like it's not a major change. However, when we started to see these results flow through the account, we were starting to see a high level of very unrelated search terms. And let me show you an example. Now the example I'm about to show you is for a motorcycle insurance or motorbike insurance company. And we've been been running this campaign for the four previous years and we've been running these broad match keywords, motorbike insurance, motorcycle insurance, Victoria and then your other estates in Australia with no problems at all. We were getting high conversion rates and we're getting comments from the customer that we're getting highly targeted phone calls and contact forms which ultimately is what the customer wanted. And then all of a sudden in early 2022, because these changes to the match types came through in late 2021, we started to get some notifications from this client that they of untargeted phone calls and inquiries. And what was actually happening is that this client was getting a lot of phone calls from people thinking that they had called another insurance company. So when we went through and had a look at the search terms, and I just want to clarify that this was not happening before Google made this change. We started to see that Google was actually assigning other brand names to these broad match keywords. So Allianz and Apia are actually other insurance companies over here. But taking it even further than that, Google was starting to show show this customer's ads for other search inquiries like RACQ Insurance customer service and Woolworths Insurance customer service. So it was actually triggering our ads for search terms where users were specifically mentioning a competitor's name and their customer service number. Now, we were happy for our ads to appear when the user was searching another competitor's insurance name, but we put them into a competitor campaign and previously they would never show against this keyword, motorbike insurance, and it would show up in another campaign where we specifically targeted that insurance company's name. And we're definitely not seeing our ads triggered for when people were searching something like customer service and a competitor's name. That is just something that we know we would never convert because that person was already a customer of that competitor. And this was not only affecting our exact match, because when we switched the keywords over to phrase match, it wasn't happening as much. But still, again, we were seeing the competitor's name coming up with, with that motorcycle insurance and triggering our ads. So what we had to do is we had to go through the process of removing all these broad match, adding in some phrase match, and then building out extensive negative keyword lists. And you can actually see that over a period of a couple of months, that we actually built out a negative keyword list of well over 1500 negative keywords. So now that we know the level of change that has happened with your keyword targeting, what I want to talk about now is what are the keyword match types that you should be using for your business? And even with all of these changes to the keyword targeting, my personal view is that you should still start with broad match keywords in your campaign. But I want to give the very clear warning that when I do that, in the first seven days, I am completing three different search term audits. I'm completing them on day one. So 24 hours after I've launched that campaign, I'll then come back and complete them on day four and then also on day seven. So that in the first seven days of launching a new campaign, I've already gone through on three different occasions checking the actual search terms which are triggering our ads and then going through and adding in those all important negative keywords. And the reason for why I still start with broad match keywords is because when we're going through and completing those search term audits, we don't only want to go through and add in those extra negative keywords keywords to block those keyword themes that we don't want our ads to appear for anymore. I'm also going through and seeing what are some keyword themes that our ads are converting for. And what we're especially looking for here is keywords which have a high click through ratio and a high conversion rate. And then what ends up happening in my ad groups is I have a collection of high converting Phrase Match and Exact Match keywords combined with a couple of broad match keywords so that I can continue to look out for for new potential keyword themes that I can add to my Google Ads account. And another benefit of this strategy is that when you've got broad match keywords operating with Exact Match and a phrase match keywords in your ad groups is that you can potentially still find some high converting keywords that might even be at a lower cost so a lower CPC than what you're seeing with your current Exact Match and Phrase match keywords. But then you do know that if someone searches an exact match keyword, your account is ready to bid and potentially even bid higher on that search term. And you happy for this to happen because you know that that keyword has high click through ratios and high conversion rates for your account. Let me show you now what this looks like in one of my accounts. So when we started with this account, now this campaign has been going for about 12 months. We started with a collection of three different broad match keywords including Skip Higher and Skip Bin Hire. And as you can see as this account has gone on, we've gone through and added in some extra Exact Match and Phrase Match keywords while still keeping in some of those broad match keywords. And what we're looking at doing here is you can see when we've added in these Exact match keywords is that we're adding them in when we know that we've got a really high click through ratio. So for this Total campaign, we've got the click through ratio performing really, really well at just under 12% when the industry average for this service is down at 5%. But for some of these exact match keywords, we've got that click through ratio up to nearly 15% which is three times the industry average with the conversion rates of ranging between 17% to 12.5%. So we know we're getting really strong performance with these keywords. But by keeping in these broad match keywords and some of these phrase match keywords which are shorter tail, it allows us to continue to go through and find or mine for some new potential keywords that we can add. So you can see when this one came through skip in higher Brisbane, we added that as an exact match. But then what we would also do is we continue to review that average CPC and we look to find for any keywords which have a really high CPC and we're adding them as an excluded keyword. So now that I've shown you a real life example of what this means for your account in that remember that first motorcycle insurance account that I took you through and that we were seeing that with this new keyword matching type that Google had introduced, it was even showing our ads for competitors as well as when people were searching for the competitor name plus their customer service or their phone number. So a really strong intent that people weren't looking for motorcycle insurance as what they were looking for and what their searcher intent was about was to find the customer service number for a company that they were already a member of. So we were very, very unlikely to get any conversions from that ad. And in fact, remember as I said, our customer was actually getting complaints from people ringing up thinking that they had reached that competitor's insurance company customer service. And then I just took you through what that means, how we start off with broad match keywords and then also adding in those extra exact match and phrase match keywords to your ad group targeting. And that brings us to the final issue of how do you now go about and structure your campaigns correctly and at a top level what this means because Google has gone through and changed the keyword matching we are now recommending and I'm seeing the most success having accounts that have a structure of more campaigns with less ad groups. And in some cases I've decreased the amount of ad groups in a single campaign by up to 70%. And the reason for that is because these keywords are targeting broader and broader themes, those large amounts of ad groups are irrelevant and they can actually be dangerous to your campaign. And the reason for that is because you're no longer able to carry out specific ad copy split tests for individual keyword themes. And this is the reason for why the very common practice of having single keyword ad groups is just doesn't work anymore. And if you want to find out why this doesn't work and how you need to go about structuring your ad groups correctly so that you can continue to see improved performance with your Google Ads campaign, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. See you next time.