Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match: The Importance of Match Types


By Andrea Kaduk, Account Supervisor

The advertising team recently had a deep dive on match type best practices and I wanted to share some of our learnings and how to utilize match types to help your campaigns.

Google has found that nearly 20% of daily queries have not been seen in the last 90 days, if at all. With people becoming more
sophisticated in the way they search, it is nearly impossible to bid on every keyword variation relevant to your business. That’s where broad match types can help and don’t be scared to try them out! Broad match can be a useful match type as it saves times and helps with the impossible of capturing every query relative to your ads out there. It is especially useful for brand awareness accounts and those trying to gain volume. However with broad match, you have to understand that your keywords will be matched to a wide variety of
closely related terms and some of those terms you may not want to match to. That’s why it’s important that when running on broad match, it’s recommended that you continually run search query reports to help identify irrelevant matches and build out an extensive negative keyword list.

While broad match is effective at getting more clicks for your program, it’s also important to realize the value behind phrase and exact match and how these match types are great tools at filtering traffic to the right ads and driving account efficiencies.

Match type mirroring is a great strategy for accounts with strict conversion (ROAS/CPA) goals. Using a mix of match types allows you to bid higher on exact terms and lower on broad match terms to help improve overall efficiency. Knowing that your exact matched keywords are highly relevant to your ads, you can assume that your CTR will be higher and you will most likely receive a higher quality score on these terms which grants lower CPC and higher position. This is the primary goal of match type mirroring – becoming more cost efficient – so bidding higher on exact match doesn’t necessarily mean you are paying more, in fact it’s quite the opposite. Once implemented, the engines will default match to the keyword with the highest quality score (budget and max CPC permitting) , so rest assured your best performing keywords will be matched to first and you will be paying less than if you just stayed on broad match (win). Additionally with using a mix of match types, you are still ensuring that your ads will be seen for a wide variety of keywords, but with the exact terms prioritized, which is key.

Here are a few best practices the advertising team recommends when doing match type mirroring:
•Use match type mirroring on top volume keywords
•Segment the various match types into separate ad groups or campaigns to better control budget and reporting capabilities
•Run search query reports regularly to help build out an extensive negative keyword list, especially for broad match groups
•Use a tiered bidding strategy, bidding highest on exact match terms and lower on broad
•Leverage bid management tools when applicable
•Monitor account performance before and after implementation

Many teams at RM have seen great success with match type mirroring, with CPCs ranging from 13-15% lower on exact match terms than the same term on broad match. You can only imagine what this does for conversion metrics when applied to all top volume keywords. So get on it, test it out, I bet you will see success!

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