Broad Match vs Phrase Match vs Exact Match

October 28, 2010 By 4 Comments

Trada is doing a blog post series on keywords. Last week: Intro to Keywords. Next week: Negative Keywords. Join Trada for an upcoming webinar on Crash Course on Keywords - Weds., Dec. 15 at 11 am MT.

When using keywords in paid search, you can enter keywords in multiple formats to determine exactly how keywords will trigger advertisements. Four formats that can change how you implement keywords are broad match, phrase match, exact match and negative match. We’ll cover negative match next week.

1. Broad match keywords

Not only will the search engine search for the keyword(s) you’re using but also similar phrases and relevant variations. Broad match will include misspellings, plurals and synonyms.

Pros: You can drive significantly more traffic to your ads. You spend less time coming up with long-tail keywords.

Cons: Your traffic is less targeted and less likely to convert. Your keyword may not be strongly correlated to your ad or landing page, and that can hurt your Google Quality Score.

Next week we’ll talk about how you can use negative keywords to ensure your keywords are more targeted.

2. “Phrase match” keywords

Search engines only trigger ads when keywords in your phrase are matched. To create phrase match keywords, surround your keyword phrases in quotes.

Pros: Phrase match is more targeted than broad match, and more flexible than exact match.

Cons: It won’t drive the traffic that broad match does, but won’t be as targeted as exact. It’s a nice in-between way to use keywords.

3. [Exact match] keywords

Search engines only trigger ads when the exact phrase is matched. To create exact match keywords, surround your keyword phrases in brackets.

Pros: Extremely targeted traffic that is more likely to convert.

Cons: Will drive less traffic. To compensate, you’ll need a very comprehensive list of keywords.

Broad Match vs Phrase Match vs Exact Match

We’ve put together a table to help you understand when an exact match type triggers an ad.

Chart Showing how exact match, broad match and phrase match works

Will Your Match Type Trigger a Paid Search Ad?

But what happens with the last row when a search term triggers broad match, phrase match and exact match? Which match takes precedence?

Exact match overrides phrase match and broad match. Phrase match overrides broad match.

Exact match > Phrase Match > Broad Match

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  • Gary

    if you want to see the difference in cost and save money on your main keywords use broad match and exact match for the same keyword. you can even use the new restrictive keywords if you are on a budget. try + mens +boat +shoes as a restricted broad match and bid the same as for [mens boat shoes} you will note that depending on the competition you will still get the traffic but usually the exact match will be a different cost..we run this on all our ad groups for our main keywords and truth be told sometimes the broad match is higher and the exact match is significantly lower thereby saving us a bit of money..and we dont lose impressions. our click through rates actually went up which google loves. we have found over 10 years that the longer you leave an ad group alone the more you are rewarded by google with position and price..i dont care what others say we have a long history with this and it is so..in the beginning of our adwords campaigns years ago we had only ppc ads and spent 700,000 dollars on google. now we get over 75% of or traffic from organics and spend 200,000 a year and our business has grown internationally from the organic listings. point being make sure you do your seo and stay the course.