Advanced Google AdWords™

Discerning Keyword Match Types

AdWords gives an advertiser a significant amount of control in determining when an ad will be shown. We will continue to discuss many of these additional options in later chapters. However, if you do not match your keywords appropriately, these additional controls will only have marginal increases in producing high quality traffic.

There are three different match types that AdWords uses to determine if your ad should be displayed based upon the user’s search query: broad, phrase, and exact match.

Broad Match

A word is considered broad matched when you enter a keyword into an ad group with no formatting around the word (Figure 2-3).

Figure 2-3: Broad matched keywords in an ad group

Broad matched keywords can trigger ...