Concordance, a step in improving your SEM performance

Keyword matches are something that can cause some confusion when using them, both for people who are just starting out and for those who have been in the world of online marketing for a few months or even years.

It is common to see accounts that have a lot of keywords in all matches and very poorly segmented. At Brand Industry, we have audited several accounts and found that some people do not understand well how matches work in Google AdWords, which include many keywords without any method or segmentation, leading to duplicate words that end up competing with each other, which increases the CPC or causes the budget to be dispersed. By dispersion, I mean that the budget is spent on irrelevant keywords or searches.

Before going into detail about matches and each of their functions, it is important to understand a concept about what close variants are. Close variants are a term that must be clear and always present when choosing and optimizing the performance of keywords in Google AdWords. Remember that matches are slight variations of a keyword that include misspellings, plural, singular, acronyms, abbreviations, and accents but do not include synonyms. Close variants affect all types of matches except negatives, so this type of variation applies to broad, exact, and phrase matches.

Google AdWords has four types of match/keyword:

• Exact
• Phrase
• Broad
• Broad modified

Broad match

It is the type of match with which you reach a wider audience. When you use broad match, the ad is eligible to appear whenever the user performs a search that includes any keyword or phrase in any order, synonyms, and close variants. Therefore, you may appear in various queries that have nothing to do with the campaign's objective, for irrelevant searches, and with this, you will get many clicks or visits where many of them will be of low quality, and the budget will be exhausted faster.

The suggestion is to use this type of match when you want to find new search terms and generate more traffic to the website. If you plan to use this type of keywords in your account, you must be very careful and do good keyword research to avoid wasting the budget as much as possible.

Broad match modified

It allows you to have greater control over the queries made by people about how they actually search. When you include it in the account, you must place the + sign before any keyword. This tells Google that when the user performs the query, these keywords that we have placed the + sign on are included, and only then, if this requirement is met, will the ad be shown. It should be noted that it is not necessary to put the + sign on all keywords. This type of match is usually used when launching a campaign and helps find possible combinations.

Phrase match

Allows greater control, phrase match is configured by enclosing all words in quotes, and the ad is activated when the user writes the phrase in the exact order that the words were included in the campaigns. However, there may be words before or after this phrase.

Exact match

It is the most restrictive and offers greater control. Although it is true that you will receive less traffic, fewer impressions, and less visibility, in return, you achieve greater relevance regarding the affinity of the keyword and the term with which people perform the query.

To establish a keyword in exact match, it is enough to be within brackets. What we recommend is to be very attentive to the search terms report to find possible negative words and combinations that have nothing to do with what is being advertised. The advantage of using exact match is that the person who clicks on the ad surely has a real interest in the product or service you offer, which will increase the CTR, the conversion rate, and clearly the profitability of the campaigns.

Negative

These words, despite not being part of the matches, can be linked to the different matches. Negative words are those that block those irrelevant terms and searches that we do not want to appear in our ad. These negative words do not support close variants or synonyms. Something not so well known about negatives is that they support different types of matches.

Now that you know a little more about Google Ads matches, we invite you to play with the different options so that you discover with which changes you manage to have more traffic, with which words you have more conversions, and thus generate more specific ad groups for each objective you have on your website. Remember that if you need advice, you can contact us, at Brand Industry we will be happy to support you.