AdWords Match Types Best Practices

There are 4 Keyword Match Types in Google Ads. These are broad, modified broad, phrase and exact match types. It’s important to know how each works and how it can help you target the right searches and help you run effective campaigns

I’ve listed here the top best practices for using AdWords Match Types:

Start with Phrase and Exact Match

When first launching an AdWords campaign, you should pick keyword match types according to your goals. If you have a small budget to start with for example, you should avoid adding broad match keywords.

So start by adding phrase and exact match type keywords and possibly modified broad match too. This will help to control the searches you get at the beginning.

And this is important especially when you haven’t yet built an extensive negative keyword list yet.

Later when your negative keyword list is larger and is blocking many irrelevant searches, you can add broad match type keywords to target long tail searches.

Add Multiple AdWords Match Types

Structuring campaigns or ad groups according Match Types has no significant benefit. It won’t improve your quality scores and won’t lead to a better ROI. It may help you manage your campaigns better but that’s just about it.

What’s important is that you use as many of the match types as possible. So try to add phrase, exact, modified broad and broad match. However you should have a strategy on how to use the match types.

Try to start with phrase and exact match types. And then later add modified broad and broad match types. The reason you want to do this is because you want to control the searches you get.

Add Negative Keywords

With phrase, broad and modified broad match type keywords it’s important that you add negative keywords. They’ll help to block any searches that are not relevant to your business.

This is not so much a problem with exact match types because they match to exact searches or close variants of them.