Broad Match Results and Strategy

How should you use Google’s new and improved broad match?

Google claims that this new version of broad match is smarter than the previous version, to some extent I think that’s true, however keyword matching to broad match is still VERY broad and it’s difficult to funnel traffic toward other keywords. Even though Google says that the exact match version of a keyword will be prioritized I have found that broad match keywords will still match to search terms that have an exact match keyword in the account quite often. So, if that’s the case how can you keep the broad traffic under control and make broad match keywords work for you instead of against your account structure? 

Last year I did a large search term analysis where I looked at the matching search terms for both brand and nonbrand campaigns of our broad match keywords. I found that for the most part broad match for brand keywords tend to be more expensive than exact match and that the opposite was true for nonbrand, where broad match keywords were actually more efficient. Because of this I would recommend:

Use branded broad keyword in their own campaign (with brand controls added on) as it’s hard to control where your spend goes and should be used as more of a keyword mining tool as it’s typically more expensive than regular branded keywords. 

For nonbrand add one broad match keyword per ad group / landing page (adding more than that just causes account bloat and unnecessary segmentation of data) and monitor your traffic closely. In this case think of broad match as similar to a DSA campaign, Google will use your ad groups landing page to match out to search terms it thinks is highly relevant. Landing page optimization will be increasingly important as Google continues to push broad match keywords and performance max campaigns that take traffic monitoring tools away from marketers.