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Some people “don’t use phrase anymore”, are they jumping to broad?
My understanding is that broad needs good conversion volume and i'd still be concerned it would let a bunch of junk through.
I am not prepared to be adding a billion negatives in a day. Currently, we are on track to get 40 leads with an exact match only campaign. The search volume doesn't look like it has room for the budget to be scaled very much.
Should I switch to broad or is phrase fine? I've heard reports of people having a good time with 40-60 conversions with a broad match campaign. i"ve also heard many people mentioning that they just don't use phrase anymore. Phrase strikes me as exact + junk (phrase doesn't take into account customer search history) whereas broad is just matching intent (while using all of Google signals), which can work well with smart bidding.
What are your thoughts?
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1 Reply
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Broad match has improved a lot lately in my opinion. I tend to gravitate towards exact/broad mixes now. So probably I am one of those people.
Edit: Yes as you said, broad match tends to work nice with smart bidding.
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Broad match is going nuts in a good way for the place I’m at. We spend a lot and run both exact and phrase. Adding broad into the same adgroup as the others is Google’s advice and it seems to work well. CPA 20% lower than my exact match with no cannibalisation. Have to pinch myself that our local Google reps (we have 3) seem technically savvy
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In what industry though? Is it a local lead based business or an ecommerce store?
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Broad has worked for us in some ecommerce cases, but for example for b2b query quality is trash. So it depends
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May I ask you what’s your daily budget to get 40 leads? I’m getting one to two per day, using broad only, on $10/day budget. But I want to try exact match and see if it improves
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Exact match & manual CPC still work the best for me.
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I wish people would give this same energy to phrase match
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I often use some broad initially then add in phrase and exact from converting search terms and pause the broad match if cpa is higher.
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Use broad first and identify what doing well in your search report. Then use phrase and exact to surgically target top performers. Phrase and exact are still solid choices, you just need to know when to use it.
The issue is leads though. Make sure your conversion value is hooked up to mitigate empty clicks. Broad can be your worst enemy in leads if you’re not careful. Lean on compelling CTR until you get lead conversions.
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You could run and experiment using broad match against your current match types for a month or two.
Use a smaller budget allotment like 70-80% to your current words and 20-30% to your broad match. That way you can get an idea for the number and quality of leads. You can also get a feel for the number of negatives you might be adding.
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With the changes coming to low-performing keywords, you can say goodbye to exact match. They haven’t actually been exact for about 2 years. The only way to stay competitive is broad match, negative keywords and scrub your search terms once a week. Google loves hygiene. The 1000’s of keyword days are over. For phrase match, Google has shown a preference for advertisers using broad match. Test the waters if you are thinking of moving to broad match. Dupe out a campaign and run an experiment to compare the performance of phrase match and broad match keywords. Make sure you have a solid negative keyword list and still check on your search terms.
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Try it and see. Watch it close.
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The way that phrase match over reaches these days, I don’t know if there is much of a difference. If you have a company that sells one service – ei, window tinting – and you create a campaign with one phrase match keyword “window tinting”, I guarantee you are going to already show for weird terms outside of that like ‘make windows darker’. Rarely do I find a need to go any more broad than phrase.
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I see many people like broad match keywords but I am not sure why. For most of my accounts, I use 85%+ phrase and exact and even those show ads on many irrelevant keywords because of Google’s “close variant” formula. I only run broad in instances when I have exhausted phrase and exact and I am looking to get more ideas and even then, I have scripts that catch negative keywords and I check search terms reports more frequently.
Stick with phrase. Use broad sparingly.
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Industry specific and budget specific I have found with broad, alongside business objectives and goals. For my mIn job for an in house company spending £2.5m per month broad works amazing well and are complimentary to our full funnel using GA4 bidding for full DDA ROAS. We don’t use exact match within what broad are covering becsuse of how broad match works nowadays so we find on high scale accounts it’s better to run with just broad.
On some of my personal clients I have retainers for, I wouldn’t put broad match on as there wouldn’t be benefits at some of the budget levels, or something of the bidding options they’re wanting to run with.
If planning to run broad, I would use the “upgrade” functionality so you keep all the learnings that already exist in a campaign. I’ve found starting from scratch isn’t great for broad if you don’t want to run while waiting for learnings.
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