Modified Broad Match: Improve Your AdWords ROI with the New Keyword Match Type
July 27th, 2010 | Link-Assistant.Com | Posted in category PPC Advertising
To broad-match or not to broad-match? At one point or another most PPC advertisers face this dilemma. On the one hand broad matching can sure deliver a boatload of impressions and clicks. On the other hand you have little control over what keywords your ads will be matched against.
The problem with broad match is that it often tends to be too broad. It drives a lot of irrelevant traffic and you get to pay for clicks that will never convert. If your business is selling concert tickets online and you bid on the keyword 'concert tickets'' on broad match, your ad is likely to show up for queries like 'baseball tickets', 'airline tickets' and all kinds of tickets that you don't sell. It's a slim chance that a person looking to get on a plane to Sydney will change his mind and get a ticket to the AC/DC show in Berlin instead.
So if you want to take advantage of the broad match and the volume it can deliver, you need to carefully monitor your search query reports and exclude all irrelevant keywords and modifiers by adding them to your negative keyword list. The problem with this approach is that when you spot and exclude an irrelevant keyword you have already paid for the clicks it triggered.
You can take a proactive approach to negative keywords and try to predict unwanted queries beforehand. But as you obviously can't foresee everything, the chances are broad-matched keywords will still be driving unwanted impressions to your campaign.
Finally there's a better way to scale up your PPC campaigns and take more control of what queries your ads pop up for – modified broad match.
What's modified broad match and how to use it
Modified broad match is a new matching type on Google AdWords that after a couple of months of beta testing has been finally rolled out for all advertisers. To put it short the modified broad match sits somewhere between broad and phrase match. It lets you tap into the volume of broad matching while keeping almost same level of control that is available with phrase match.
With modified broad match you can set some keywords in a keyphrase on phrase match, while keeping the rest on broad match. The keywords you set on modified broad match will appear in the search query exactly or as a close variant (single and plural forms, abbreviations, derivatives and close synonyms).
Google posted a nice scheme on their blog that does a good job illustrating how modified broad match works and how it relates to other match types.
To set a keyword on modified broad match, simply add the + symbol right before the keyword (with no spaces as in "+keyword"). You can apply the modifier to one or all keywords in your keyphrase.
Why use modified broad match
20% of Google search quires are unique. That is, they haven't been seen in the past 90 days. Obviously you can't predict them all, however large your keyword list is. The only way to target these unique queries is by using the broad match (or better modified broad match). Let's get back to our example of online tickets business.
If you set [concert tickets] on exact match your ad will show just for that exact phrase and you'll miss keywords like "tickets for concert", "tickets for Jeff Beck concert", "buy concert tickets online", etc.
Phrase match for "concert tickets" will get your ads matched against "concert tickets" and "buy concert tickets online", but your ads won't show for queries like "tickets for concert" and "tickets for Jeff Beck concert".
On broad match your ads will pop up for all these keywords, but you'll also receive a bunch of unrelated impressions and clicks for search terms like "airplane tickets" and "baseball tickets".
If you bid on the keyword +concert +tickets on modified broad match your ads will be matched against "concert tickets", as well as keywords like "tickets for concert", "tickets for Jeff Beck concert", and other queries that you would have been missing out on if you used phrase match. At the same time your ads won't be showing up for irrelevant queries that are covered by conventional broad match.
To test modified broad match and see if it works for you, clone one of your ad groups where you use broad, exact or phrase match and set the keywords in it on modified broad match. Run both groups for a while and then compare the search query reports to see what match type performed best.
Report back when you get the results. We'd love to hear how modified match affected your campaigns.
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