Keywords can become complex very quickly. So here’s our simple guide.
It’s really important to get your keywords right, otherwise you might waste a lot of time and money…
Here are the 4 match types:
- Broad match. Suppose you sell women’s hats so you choose the keyword ‘women’s hats’. By default, this will be a broad match. Google will just try and find anything related to ‘women’s’ or ‘hats’ – and it could show your ad for all sorts of things. If you’re using broad match, you need to stop now. It’s not a good plan.
- Broad match modified. If you put a plus sign (+) in front of ‘women’s’ and a plus sign in front of ‘hats’, ie +women’s +hats, what that’s saying to Google is that the terms ‘women’s’ and ‘hats’ need to be somewhere in the sentence eg. ‘Where can I buy women’s hats’ or ‘women’s hats for sale’ or even ‘hats women’ – it can be around the other way. This is actually quite a good thing because it’s starting to narrow things down a bit.
- Phrase match. Add quotation marks around each phrase if the order needs to be the same eg. “women’s hats”. Generally, if you’re doing broad match modified, you won’t need to do phrase match as well.
- Exact match. This is when someone types in precisely [women’s hats]. If there are any Google Ad managers here, you’ll know that Google has played with that and it’s not as great as it used to be. Ensure your campaign has a mixture of broad match modified and exact match. These are the two options that you can play with to make sure you are getting the right traffic.
As always, if you’re having trouble with your Google Ads, or with any other digital marketing, we’re here to help! Contact us anytime.
