Broad Match is giving me a headache

Actually, it’s not even broad match anymore, it’s “Advanced Match”. The original broad match worked well. However, “Advanced Match” has declined in performance over the past several months.

A Brief Introduction
Google has four keyword matching options that can trigger a pay-per-click ad. Those match types are: Broad, Phrase, Exact, and Negative. For the purpose of this discussion, we will exclude negative match type. That is a totally different conversation, but still very essential for a well optimized campaign.

Per Google’s definition, below are the other 3 match types:

1. Broad match: Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations
2. Phrase match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase
3. Exact match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively

(Notice, there is not an actual “Advanced Match”. Broad Match IS Advanced Match, but not really it’s Broad Match. Just not the original Broad Match. Broad Match would be good if it was Broad Match, but Broad Match is really Advanced Match. I want to opt out of Advanced Match and keep Broad Match, the original Broad Match. … Ugh! See what I mean by headache? You have one too now, don’t you? )

Diana Adams helps you make sense of those 3 match types on SearchEngineGuide.com. It’s great reading to help anyone get started with the match types.

All three of above match types have their advantages and disadvantages. Broad matched traffic, for example, will not convert as well as exact matched. That is often because the ad and/or landing page is not tailored toward that targeted keyword. It may also perform poorly because the match may be too broad and irrelevant to the actual keyword.

Because of the ever-growing use of long-tailed search queries, exact match will never match all of the traffic that exists. Daily costs can quickly ski-rocket with broad match, because of the extensive queries that it matches. Thus, analytics must be closely observed to find out when it is appropriate to use broad, phrase or exact.

The Headache

At first, those match types seem simple, and at one time they were. However, over the past 8 months, Google has made some significant changes to broad match. Broad match has recently been “Expanded”. Those changes are causing an increase in spend and a decrease in conversion, which means many marketers may be shutting down broad match soon. Especially, if the broad match (Advanced Match) changes continue.

The problem with broad match being “too broad” has always existed, but those problems were able to be overcome with phrase matching, pausing and/or an extensive negative keyword list. It’s only recently that these matches have reached out of control.

One problem with the new “enhancement” is a broad match term competing against an exact match term. If a search query matches exactly, then the exact match keyword should be the keyword that Google matches. That would mean that the tracking tags, landing page, and ad type are the intended match.

Yes, that is ideal, but is that always what happens? Yes, if two keywords are active, and equal in bid, then the exact match “wins” our over broad match.

However, what happens if an exact match keyword is performing poorly and the keyword is paused? Because that keyword is poor, the last thing you would want is traffic on that keyword. However, because it’s paused it now becomes eligible for broad match. D’oh! That’s exactly why the keyword was paused to begin with. Thus, the headache continues.

The simple fix is for Google to count all exact matches, paused or not, as a match. That would basically treat a paused exact match keyword as a negative keyword. Currently, advertisers have to tweak minimum bids on keywords that SHOULD be paused. This allows the keywords to be active, but have a low enough bid that it costs very little. Of course, the bid can’t be too low, because then it becomes inactive. And the inactive means, it’s now eligible for Advanced Match … er, I mean broad match.

Rich discusses some improvements Google can do to prevent these headaches on distilled.co.uk

Another nice addition would be to add another optional match type: Advanced Match. Then, we can opt out of Advanced Match type and broad match will remain “broad”.

Ultimately, the broad match strategy by Google is causing advanced pay-per-click advertisers to go around and circles with their ads. Now, do you feel that throbbing directly between your eyes? It is called the “Broad Match Headache”.