Google Keyword Match Types – Usage and Examples

Keywords are the basic building blocks of any Digital Marketing campaign and thus need special attention to be paid while choosing one. In the following article, we’ll be discussing the different types of Keyword Match Types available with Google Ads.

What are Keyword Match Types?

Keyword match types helps you control the type of searches on Google which trigger your ads. Understanding them is pretty important in order to run a successful marketing campaign. Keyword match types basically are the parameters that can be set on keywords to limit their SERP visibility.

Why are Keyword Match Types important?

Choosing the right keyword match type would have a huge impact on the overall ROI of the campaign. Using match types helps you to eliminate unwanted keywords from triggering your ad, thus saving you on unwanted clicks, lowering your overall cost-per-click, and improving upon the CTR and landing page performance, all of which would attribute towards Ad Rank. To learn more about Google Ad Rank factors, click here.

What are the various Keyword Match Types in Google?

Google AdWords provides you with 5 different keyword match types:

• Broad match
• Modified Broad match
• Phrase match
• Exact match
• Negative match

Keyword Match Types Overview

Let’s take a look at a high-level on how these match types are crafted along with their syntax or special symbols.

Broad Match Keyword

What is a Broad match type keyword?

When a broad match keyword is used, your ad is eligible to be shown every time when someone searches for the keyword or relevant variations of your keywords, including synonyms, possible misspellings, stemming’s, and other related searches.

By default, a broad match is the default match type that is assigned to keywords if you don’t mention explicitly.

When to use broad match keywords?

Broad match keywords should be used when your goal is to attract more visitors to your website without spending much time on building the initial keyword list.

Symbol for broad match keyword? None

Broad match keyword example

Broad keyword used: cycle shop

How a broad match keyword can help you?

• Less time spent on building keyword list: In case of broad match, you don’t need to think of every possible keyword variation, as it is automatically taken care of. It is also nearly impossible to create a completely unique list considering a large portion of new searches are unique.
• Spend money on keywords that work: If an ad of yours doesn’t receive any click on a particular keyword variation, the Google Ad system would automatically stop showing your ads for that variation. This prevents you from spending on keywords that aren’t of much help.

Broad Match Modifier Keyword

What is a broad match modifier type keyword?

Broad match modifier keywords give you more control than using the standard broad match keywords. This makes sure that your ads shown includes the words that you’ve marked with a plus sign (+), or it’s close variations. Additional words may appear before, after, or in between your ‘+’ terms.

Symbol for broad match modifier keyword? Plus sign (+)

Broad match modifier keyword example

Broad match modifier keyword used: +cycle +shop

How does broad match modifier impact your ad performance?

Broad match modifiers add more specificity to your broad keywords, thus narrowing the traffic. So, while the usage of it will increase the keyword relevance, but in turn, it can decrease the traffic that you would get through a broad match otherwise.

Phrase match keyword

What is a Phrase match type keyword?

With phrase match keyword, you can show your ad to users who are searching for your exact keyword or close variations of it, with additional words before or after it (NOT IN BETWEEN).  Close variations include misspellings, singular and plural forms, acronyms, stemming, abbreviations, accents, implied terms, synonyms, and paraphrases.

Note – The word order is pretty important with phrase match, that your ad won’t appear if someone enters an additional word in between your keywords.

Symbol for phrase match keyword? Quotation marks (“ “)

Phrase match type keyword example

Phrase match keyword used: “cycle shop”

How can phrase match keywords help you?

Phrase match keywords have the following benefits:

• Create ads with the same keywords the customers search for: Based on your past search history and data from Google Analytics / Search Console, you can directly make use of the queries that user type as a phrase match.
• Increase your CTR: Phrase match increases the chances of an ad being clicked as the ad is triggered only when it matches the searcher’s phrase or its close variation.

Exact match keyword

What is an exact match type keyword?

As the name suggests, with exact match type keywords, your ads would be triggered only when the user searches for the exact keyword or its close variations. Close variants include keywords with similar meaning, regardless of spelling or grammar similarities.

Out of all the keyword match types, the exact match gives you the most control over who gets to see your ad and can highly improve your CTR.

What are the close variations of exact match keyword for which ad is triggered?

• Misspellings, singular or plural forms, stemming, abbreviations, and accents
• Reordered words like [jeans men] and [men’s jeans].
• Addition or removal of function words. Function words are prepositions (like in or to), conjunctions (like for or but), articles (like a or the), and others that do not impact the meaning or intent of the search. For instance, [jeans for men] is a close variation of [men jeans].
• Implied words
• Synonyms or paraphrases

Symbol for phrase match keyword? Square braces ([ ])

Exact match type keyword examples

Exact match keyword used: [cycle shop]

Negative keyword

What are negative match type keywords?

Negative keyword helps you exclude your search terms from campaigns and help you focus on keywords that matter to your business. When you specify a particular keyword as negative, any searches related to that keyword would stop your ads from being shown up.

What are the types of Negative Keywords?

For Search campaigns, you can make use of broad match, phrase match, or exact exact match negative keywords.

For Display campaigns, a set of negative keywords will be excluded as an exact topic. Ads won’t be shown on the page if the content of the page relates to the negative keyword specified.

b) Negative Phrase match keyword

In case of negative phrase match, your ad won’t be shown if the search contains the exact terms in the same order.

Example of negative phrase match: “sports shoes”

c) Negative exact match

In this case, your ad won’t be shown if the search contains the exact keyword terms, in the same order.

Example of negative exact match: [sports shoes]

Are Keyword Match Types different for SERP and SEO?

The Keyword match types function pretty much the same in terms of SERP or SEO. The only difference being the metric looked into. In the case of SERP, more preference would be given to keywords search volume and CPC bid, while in case of SEO, the metrics would be search volume and SEO difficulty.

Summary

In this article, you’ve learned about the 5 different types of keyword match types used in Google: broad match, broad match modifier, phrase match, exact match, and negative keywords. You also learned the symbols for the usage of each of these along with their examples.

Reference – Google Help Center

FAQs