Learning the Difference between Broad, Phrase & Exact Match Bidding

When you’re playing in the realm of PPC & especially when you first get started many people usually just slap in a load of keywords & hope of the best. However, as you become more accustomed to the way PPC works & the searching habits of your prospective buyers you’ll learn to keep your campaigns much, much more targeted.

This article will explain the difference between Broad, Phrase & Exact Match targeting within Google Adwords.

First when choosing keywords for a PPC campaign I usually use Keyword Elite to help me narrow down the variants of keywords I want & the different phrases I want to target.

When you’re inputting they keywords into Adwords there are a number of different options you can use:

Broad Match: This is the most primitive form of keyword input. An example would be:

online playstation games

But since it’s a broad match it would also trigger for the following phrases:

playstation games online

games online playstation

playstation online games

The problem with this is that often when the words in a particular phrase a rearranged they can become untargeted & mean something completely different to what someone is actually searching for. Thus reducing your CTR & potentially losing you money in clicks.

Phrase Match: Phrase Match is a much more targeted way to pinpoint exact phrases that someone might use to search for a particular product.

For example:

“playstation games online”

Would also trigger for the following phrases:

buy playstation games online

order playstation games online

purchase playstation games online

However this particular type of targeting can also match for certain undesirable keywords such as:

free playstation games online

download free playstation games online

So it’s important to utilise Negative keywords for the words download & free to avoid you paying for ads in which people are looking for free games. This again will increase your CTR & save you money.

Exact Match: This is the most targeted type of match & the one I prefer to use most often. With this match you can target the exact keywords you want to trigger your ads. The more targeted you are the higher your conversions will be.

For example:

[buy playstation 3 in texas]

[buy playstation 3 memory card online]

So now you have know how all the matching type work, if you’re already running PPC campaigns load them up & see how you can increase your CTR on certain words be being more targeted with your matching types & using negative matching to get rid of the words you don’t want appearing.