The NEW Way Google Ads Keyword Match Types Work

Google keyword match types have changed over the last few years and they're highly important. A lot of people I talk to still don't quite understand how each match type works and which match types they should be using in their account. In this video, I'm going to give you a complete breakdown of the three keyword match types Google gives you. I'm going to show you which ones you should be using in your account and how to effectively use each match type. I'm also going to show you a real life account where I show you which terms are being pulled for each match type and the performance that I'm getting from those match types. So let's go ahead and dive in. All right, let's start with Google's support page on keyword match types. I think they actually do a pretty good job of explaining the match types and how they behave. I am actually going to start with exact match. So you have three match types, you have exact, you have phrase, and you have broad. Most explanations. And including Google, they, for whatever reason, only start with broad. Mainly because I think that's why they're pushing broad so much on advertisers right now, which you don't exactly want to do quite yet. But let me show you. So you have exact match, and in this example, they're using the keyword lawn mowing service. You have three match types. You could add this keyword. So you have the exact match, and that's going to be with brackets. Those brackets indicate to Google this is an exact match keyword. So what searches could an exact match show for? And these are the key terms you want to know when it comes to your match type. So ads may show on searches that are the same meaning as your keyword, so that the same meaning as your keyword is highly important. Years ago, an exact match keyword literally would be the exact match. So if you had lawn mowing service added as an exact match keyword, it would only show for lawn mowing service that no longer exists. An exact match is pretty loose these days. It does behave very similar to like a phrase or even abroad at times. So what Google's saying is you may add lawn mowing service as an exact match, but we're going to show your ad for that keyword for any term that means the same thing. So in this example, grass cutting service. So it's the same thing, it's just someone searched it differently. So xact match is the tightest control you're going to have on your keyword match types. We still use A lot of Exact match. It's also going to be the most expensive when you look or usually when you look at your cost per clicks. I for whatever reason just think Google somehow program that into match types like you pay a premium to run Exact Match. I like Exact Match though a lot because it does give me that control. If you can get exact match keywords to work, you're going to find that they convert the highest, so usually they will have the highest conversion rate. However, sometimes Exact Match won't work as well due to the premium cost you're paying on those CPCs compared to phrase and broad. In those cases then you just have to live with the phrase and broad match types of those terms. But Exact match gives you nice tight control. That does limit you though. Because of the tight matching you may not get the volume that you need and so there's a world to use all three and I will show you a real life scenario of that. But just know Exact Match is as tight as you can get in Google Ads where you can kind of control the searches that you're showing for. Next you have Phrase match. So again, key terms here. What does phrase match mean? According to Google, Ads may show on searches that include the meaning of your keyword. So again exact says it's the same meaning as your keyword. Phrases includes the meeting of your keyword. So using lawn mowing service Again, they use lawn mowing service near me. Phrase match could fire for that. Hire a company to mow lawn. Phrase Match could could fire that landscaping services to cut grass. Now a phrase match uses quotation marks around it. So if you add quotation marks around your keyword inside of your account that will fire or indicate to Google that that is a Phrase match keyword. So this is they call it moderate matching. I still use I know a lot of people only use broad and exact or a lot of people are just using broad. Now I still do find myself using Phrase match when the wording really means a lot or if I'm not using Broad match yet and I'm just using phrase. And again, I'm going to tell you how we still manage match types within our accounts and how we're having a lot of success still because it's not exactly what a lot of people are talking about today. In some of the videos I'm seeing and blog posts and podcasts and everything else, everyone is very much on just Broad match only now I think that world is coming in the future future, but we are still not there in my opinion. So I am still using a mixture of match types. And I'm going to share with you that exact formula a little bit later on. So stay tuned. In the video, then next match type, we have Broad Match. So in this case, lawn mowing services. Broad match is basically ads may show on searches that relate to your keyword. Basically you're saying Google's like, hey, we can kind of, it's almost, it's a theme. So lawn mowing service, you're like, well, we'll show ads for anything sort of related to to lawn mowing. So here there's lawn aeration prices. That is not technically what you probably would want though, if you were bidding on lawn mowing services. So most of the time for our clients, we do not sprinkle Broad match keywords in until we have a campaign that's already dialed in. It's already hitting our performance goals. We already have smart bidding, whether that's targeted CPA or targeted roas or working and performing well. Then we sprinkle in broad to accelerate the volume of ad impressions that we're going to get. This will give you scale. Broad match is great with scale. I only use broad match though, when I'm using smart bidding. That's already hitting my goal, usually with exact match or phrase match. So be very careful with Broad match. It will show for a lot of unrelated things. I will again show you an example of that. And so you have to be very diligent about adding negative keywords when utilizing broad. But this is going to give you usually the most volume. And Broad match works very well with smart bidding once you have smart bidding dialed in. So let's go show some examples here further on Broad Match. So here they give you an example. Low carb diet plan. You'll see it shows for Mediterranean diet books. It shows for recipes, low calorie recipes. Again, this is super broad. They're just saying, hey, these are related terms to low carb diet plan. But you may, if you're bidding on that term, you may have a low carb diet plan ebook that you're trying to get leads to or sell. And someone looking up recipes or Mediterranean diet books might have nothing to do with that. And so this is why you have to be extremely careful with Broad Match. Then they give you an example of some phrase. So tennis shoes, shoes for tennis. Buy tennis shoes on sale. Red tennis shoes, comfortable tennis sneakers. Again, they will not show you for tennis store or shop for sneakers. Broad match could, but phrase would not. Because again, phrase has to include the meaning of your keyword. And then exact match shoes for men. Basically it's going to be men's shoes related search terms. This is kind of a generic shoes from an exact match keyword. And so it's not going to show you for like men's tennis shoes or shoes for boys in that example. Sometimes I've seen it get pretty broad though. So you have to always make sure you're looking at your search query report when you're looking at your match types. Let's actually dive into a real account and I'm going to show you how each match type is behaving and what search terms it's firing ads for. So let's go ahead and dive in. Okay, so I'm inside of an actual campaign. You'll notice I have broad match because there's nothing, no brackets or quotations around it. I have exact match keyword here, you see by the brackets. And then I have phrase and that's from those quotations. When you're adding keywords, you can do it yourself. So let's say best modular sectional, I would add that to add it as phrase. I would add the brackets to add as. Exactly. And then if I wanted to go broad, I would just type it out like that. So that's how you add those match types. You can also change. So here's a broad match. I can come here and change the match type inside of your column. Match type there. So super simple to add keyword match types. Now let's look at how these terms are behaving. You'll notice, in fact I mentioned this, this, this is actually a perfect example. My exact match has the highest conversion rate. My phrase match has the second highest conversion rate and broad is the lowest. Now I get most my volume from this broad keyword in this account. Obviously we've spent quite a bit of money here in this example, over a hundred thousand dollars. And then my return is the lowest on the broad, highest on exact and second highest on phrase. It doesn't always work that way. This is just a perfect example I guess to show you though on how some of these match types behave. Again, this is usually going to be the loosest. You see my click through rate on my Exact match is almost 9%. Phrase is about 5.8 and then it's about a 7.7 on broad. That's fairly normal that you're going to have a higher click through rate on your exact match too because it's so tight in the targeting where broad's going to show you a bunch of stuff. So let me show you. Let's start with the exact match. So we have modular couch. So I'm going to click that, I'm going to hit search terms. These are all the terms that it fired the this keyword has fired for. So they've got 7,500 clicks here. They're not all modular couch. Now more than 50% of them are, are literally the exact search modular couch. But then the rest are different variations of modular couch, but it means the same thing. So I am going to put search term does not contain couch, sofa, sectional or let's do modular. And now you'll see here's the reason I'm showing this. You'll note these are all just misspellings of sectional. So I don't need to worry about that. But basically every single click that I've received had the meaning of couch, sofa, sexual or modular in the search terms. So that means it's doing a really good job of showing search terms that mean the same thing as modular couch. That example will make more sense when I show you how broad works. So let's look at phrase real quick. I'm going to do the same thing. You'll notice it gets a little looser, right? Sectionals with removable covers, modular sectionals, IKEA modular sectionals, which is kind of a. That's a obviously a store cloud sectionals. So this gets a little looser, but it relates to modular sectionals. So I'm going to do the same filter does not contain and we'll do couch, sofa, sectional and then modular. And again, a lot of these are misspellings. I have no idea how a product sort of number got pulled here. That's a bit odd to me. But you'll notice out of 84,000 clicks from that term, only two of them came from basically these what I would call broad search terms here. So phrase is fairly. It's not as tight as exact, but it's, it's still doing a pretty good job. Now the reason I'm showing you these search terms and how they're being pulled because look at this broad match now. So I'm going to pull broad match. Broad matches had 35, 000 clicks. I'm going to do the same thing though. So search term does not contain sectional, sofa, couch. I think every time I've spelled this out differently, but Here we go. Boom. 2,000 clicks have come from terms that don't even contain sectional, sofa, couch or modular. So now let's look at that furniture with removable covers. Boy, that could mean a lot of things that's super broad. Futon with storage. We don't sell futons, so this would be a negative keyword I need to add for futons and tiny house furniture that is very broad and I don't know how that has anything to do with modular couch. I'm sure people buy modular couches for their tiny houses, but this is very, very broad. Let's look at some more studio apartment furniture. Stay home body. I don't even know what that means. American made love seats. This is a modular sofa. It's. The keyword is literally modular couch and it's showing loveseat terms. So I wanted to show you that because you've got to be very diligent on negative keywords when dealing with broad match because it goes so broad. However, I cannot argue the results. This is the filtered keywords here. Out of about 600,000 in revenue, 400,000 of it was generated from from that broad match. Part of that is Google does a really good job with broad match. It gives you more signals, intent signals with smart bidding. So it works wonderfully with smart bidding. If I was manually bidding modular couch as a broad term or using maximize clicks, it would do horrendous 99% of the times. I have a full video, by the way, on bid strategies. I will add that to the description and we'll also add it to this video here. Go check that out on how on what bid strategies you should be using and when. But in this case with match types, you do not want broad match being used. Unless you already have smart bidding working in a campaign, it's already hitting your goal. So how do we use our match types when starting a campaign out? If I have a campaign that's new and I don't have my goal being hit yet, I usually start with exact match and phrase match. Then once I get my exact match and phrase match working, and in some cases exact might not work because the costs are too high. So I have to pause it out. And maybe it's just phrase match. It could be a combination. But I'll start with phrase and exact match terms. Then once I get those terms dialed in, I'm getting conversions. They're hitting my goal, whether that's a set CPA goal or roas goal. And I'm using smart bidding, whether that's target ROAS or target cpa. Then to get increased scale from my campaign. Then I start sprinkling in those broad match terms. However, I never start with broad match terms. In very rare cases, I will do that a year from now I may have to update this video because maybe starting with Broad Match is the way to go. I know some people are claiming that today. They say just go ahead and start with Broad Match. I still have more success starting with Exact and phrase and then moving to Broad Match once my campaign's dialed in. That is what we still have the most success with, with our client accounts managing millions and millions of dollars in spend. So utilize Broad as kind of like the accelerator to your campaign, but do not start with broad. Start with Exact and Phrase. There you go. You are now a guru on Google Ad Keyword match types. Make sure to stay tuned. I have a video coming out on Google Keyword Research how to find the best keywords you should be targeting in your campaigns. You now know the match types and what match types you should be adding keywords in. This video is going to break down how to go find the top keywords you should actually be targeting within your campaigns. So make sure to subscribe, make sure to like this video and I'll see you on the next video. Thanks, Sam.