Best Practices for Broad Match

Best Practices for Broad Match: Easily Increase your high quality click volume

Of the three match types available for search marketers, broad match presents the greatest opportunity to reach new and potential customers. When you use broad match, your search ad appears for a search query that:

• Contains all of the words in your keyword in a different order
• Contains all of the words in your keyword in the same order but have other terms that are not noise words between them
• Includes  words that are closely related to your keywords

As a result of these features, utilizing broad match has a number of benefits that aren’t possible with the more granular match types.

Benefits of Broad Match

Broad match has the greatest reach, meaning that search ads appear on more queries that are relevant to your business. In addition to increasing click volume, and potentially improving ROI, this extended reach can play an important role in the keyword discovery process. 

Broad Match Best Practices

Once you’ve included broad match keywords in your account, here’s what you should keep in mind to maximize performance:

• Identify negative keywords by using the search query report, and leverage exact and phrase match negatives to block particular queries.
• Add new keywords based on queries your broad match keywords are matching to. These can be identified by pulling a search query reports. With continual enhancements to broad match, we encourage you to expand your keyword set to ensure efficiency and grow your click volume.
• Broad match uses a variety of techniques to determine if your search ad appears. Ensure consistency of query, keyword, ad copy, and landing page.
• Set up explicit bids for all match types. If implemented correctly, exact match will always serve over Broad Match within the same account if it’s eligible to serve. You can learn more about effectively bidding on all match types here.

Recent Improvements to broad match performance

In an effort to deliver the most relevant broad match traffic to advertisers, there have been a series of recent improvements to the matching technology, which include:

• Enhancing matching ability, which helps to improve the selection of phrase/broad match ads.
• Identifying conceptually similar keywords in an effort to reduce less relevant mappings
• Prioritizing landing page relevance to decrease filtration and avoid higher CPCs

As related enhancements continue to roll out, we encourage you to test more keywords on broad match and monitor the queries your keywords are being matched to.

Broad match modifier for further refinement

Broad Match Modifier is a targeting feature that lets you modify your keywords associated with broad match. This provides you with greater reach than phrase match, but more control than broad match.

The feature works by enabling you to specify which terms within a keyword need to be present within the broad-matching search traffic by adding a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword (Tip: Leave no space between the “+” and keyword).

If you already use Broad Match and regularly review your search query reports for new and negative keywords, it is not recommended to use a broad match modifier as it may restrict relevant traffic.

Instead, we recommend using Broad Match Modifier as a way to gain more traffic in a controlled manner, which is useful for more sensitive categories, such as pharmaceuticals, or if you do not use Broad Match due to the scope of the potential traffic.