PPC Match Types refine your search to better target your audience and at the same time helps reduce unwanted clicks from searchers in the browsing stage of the buying process. Each PPC match type controls the amount of searches that your keywords will receive.

Let’s explore each Types strength and weaknesses:

Are you generating sales through pay per click but the cost to convert is too high? One place to examine is your keyword match type. Do you have all your keywords on broad match and paying high bids to place on the first page? Are you bringing a high amount of traffic through your keywords but it’s not justifying your spend?

For example, if you are marketing products for Baby showers. The keyword “baby shower” will trigger your ad for any search that contains the keyword “baby” and “shower” including “how to shower your baby” or “build a shower for babies”. You can reduce the amount of impressions that the keyword will receive by placing the keyword to a Phrase match. This will ensure that when someone performs a search for “baby shower” that your ad will show. Your ad will also show if there are modifiers before or after that phrase. Such as “buy” or “online”. Exact match would only show if the keyword “baby shower” is searched on its own without any modifiers. This will reduce your traffic significantly but that traffic will be looking for the exact phrase/product that you are advertising on.

Finding when to use a certain match type may seem straight forward the real answer lies within the data. Once your campaigns have been running for a bit it is important to run a performance reports to examine the cost associated with each keyword. Two important reports are the Keyword performance report which will show you which keywords are bringing traffic to your site as well as the costs associated with them. The second report to use would be the Search query report, this report will show you what actual search terms are actually triggering your ads. This will help you identify opportunities for keyword expansion as well as identifying irrelevant queries. Once you have gone through and identified keyword costs based upon the factors from the last slide you will be able to focus on which keywords may need to be modified to a different match type.