When you set up a paid search campaign, you have to decide what keywords to use and how to use them. I would like to go over the “how to use them” part first, and in future articles I will discuss some tips, tricks and concepts for how to find effective keywords. It will make it easier to decide which words and phrases to use when you have a good idea of the best way to use them. Additionally, having a good understanding of the match types can give you the opportunity to save yourself some money or cover several different possible variations of a phrase just by using the correct match type.

Google Adwords has five different match types: broad, modified broad, phrase, exact and negative. Each one matches your keyword to a search query in a different way, or in the case of negative keywords, the queries that will not match. In this article, we are going to cover broad match and modified broad match, which I think are the most misused types, as well as negative keywords.

Broad Match Keywords

As the name implies, these will match your keywords to a wide range of search queries. When people say, “I spent a lot of money on PPC , got a lot of clicks, but nothing came out of it,” broad match keywords are usually the culprit. For example, if you  used the phrase “injury lawyer” as a broad match keyword phrase, it would return anything related to injury lawyers—jobs, fees, school, laws and statutes—as well as anything else Google might consider related to the words. This gets problematic if you are interested in car accident injuries, but your ads are also getting shown to people who were hurt on the job or had a surgical mistake.

Why would you want to use broad match keywords? Because they cover such a broad range, they can be used if you are not entirely sure of all the phrases people are using to look for a particular practice area, or if you want to have Google do a little paid keyword research for you, or if you have a lot of more specific keywords/match types already in use and you want to make sure you cover longer search queries (and uncover some “long tail” keywords)—these are all some different ways to use broad match keywords. Take note, however: You will need to use negative keywords to filter out the results, otherwise you will get all those job-, school-, fees-related queries that are not what you want and will cost you money.

Modified Broad Match Keywords

A variant of the broad match,  this keyword class specifies that a keyword or variant of that keyword, including synonyms, plurals, misspellings and abbreviations, MUST be included in the search query. Using our example above, if we specified “injury lawyer” as modified broad match, it would narrow the focus a bit to contain words that were more closely related—such as “personal injury attorney” or “lawyer for car accident injury.” It is still possible to get what I would consider semi-relevant results using modified broad match, so I would still recommend extensive use of negative keywords to filter the results.

Negative Keywords

When you specify a negative keyword, no results will be returned that contain that word or phrase. Smart use of negative keywords is the best way to use broad match and modified broad match, and it is a great way to control and narrow the focus of all your ad groups. Keeping with our “injury lawyer” example, adding phrases such as “on the job” or “at work” if you primarily want personal injury cases would be effective. More general things like “pro bono” and “jobs” and “videos” are good to include, too. Basically, anything you can think of that you want to avoid in a search query, add it as a negative keyword. Match types can be specified when using negative keywords—your choices are broad, phrase and exact—so be careful you do not accidentally block out relevant phrases. I recommend using phrase and exact match. Also, plurals are not automatically assumed, so each variation must be added: “job” and “jobs,” for example.