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Has phrase match really become useless for B2B lead gen in Google search?
Posted by on November 21, 2025 at 3:00 pmI haven't conclusively tested it out myself, but looking at the search terms, I could see that phrase match and broad match are targeting quite similar searches.
Some sources say that we shouldn't use broad and phrase match in the same ad group because it splits data and makes conversion more expensive. Has anyone run an experiment on this and can back this up?
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1 Reply
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CPCs are also typically higher and the quality is not significantly better
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That’s my impression too.
You target “crm for real estate agents” and actual search term: ‘salesforce’, THANKS! -
It’s not useless, but it can be confusing and often irrelevant. Let me explain.
For context, all I run are lead generation Google Ads campaigns for service businesses in the U.S. Our main campaign type is Search.
In my experience, there are two main ways to get good results in lead generation. One is manual CPC on exact match, and the other is Max Conversions on broad and exact match.
Phrase match is basically a broader keyword that doesn’t fully use Google’s AI to capture people based on search intent.
Here’s how we usually approach it. If we’re selling a very specific service to a targeted audience, like B2B commercial services, we stick to exact match. If we’re selling a more common service to a wider audience, like homeowners looking for plumbers, we lean more into broad match.
That said, we never start with broad match on a brand-new account or on an account with little to no conversion history.
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