lemaireolivier

Google announced in may the release of a new match type, but it is only recently that they released for the rest of Europe. In this blogpost, I will try to look at how this match type works and what are it’s pro’s and con’s. Feel free to comment on this!

What’s the Modified Broad Match

First let’s quickly recap what broad, phrase and exact match types are all about:

With the table above you will have understand that the Broad Match type will not give you a lot of control on the queries you are being matched to.

The modified broad match targeting is basically a broad match with more control. It gives the ability to have a keyword in broad match but limit the scope of this broad match to certain terms contained in your keyword and at the same time it is not as restrictive as Broad or Phrase.

How it works

To activate it you just need to buy your keyword in broad match and add a “+” in front of the term for which you want to restrict the broad matching to plurals and misspellings.

Pro’s

1. Control over your ads and landing pages relevancy

With Google broad match type getting broader and broader, this option will give you all the controls you need to ensure well-targeted ads and landing pages. What’s more frustrating than having a page dedicated to Italy but not using it because all “flights to italy” queries are being broad matched to your “flight to Rome” keywords that have a better QS and a higher CPC?

2. Control your investment

While broad matching is a pretty nice option to ensure that you have as much traffic as you can, it represents a risk in terms of performance measurement and CPC adjustment. Let’s take an example of queries that can be broad matched to “flight to Rome” and their performances over a certain timeframe

You can easily see that, the negative performance of the queries “Flight to Milan” and “Flight to Italy” are clearly affecting and screwing the data for the keyword “flight to Rome” on which the CPA (in exact match) is 20 euros. Compare this to the 28,92 euros that you think you have due to non-requested queries being matched to it and you will directly understand why more restrictive match type are useful.

By knowing the true value of a keyword you will be able to distribute your budget in the most efficient way.

3. Scale your campaigns easily

The major drawback of using negative keywords to control your traffic is the amount of work it requires. Let’s take an easy example; if you have 10 adgroups (one destination you cover), you want to include all destinations in all adgroups as a negative excepted the destination covered by each individual adgroup. So with 10 adgroups you end up having 10*9 = 90 negative keywords. Now imagine you are a big travel company with 400 destinations, that’s 400*399 = 159 600 negative keywords. Now, if you are detailed and you have variation of each adgroup per destination, let’s say one for lastminute, one for cheap and one for more generic terms, that is 400*3*399 = 478 800 negative keywords to have. Add to that the fact that google limits the number of keywords in each account at 1 million and you will quickly ends up with an issue of scalability.

The modified broad match will help you limit the number of negative keywords needed and therefore help you scale your campaigns easily.

Con’s

1. Limit you visibility

It is common practice to use modified broad match targeting as a starting point in order to collect Search Queries Data and then use those data to enrich your keywords listing (and to add negative keywords). If you don’t use modified broad keywords well, you might end up by not having visibility anymore on those queries and therefore limit the possibility of increasing your keywords reach.

For example, you know for sure that you don’t want to appear on “Cheap Flight to Italy” when you are buying the term “Cheap Flight to Rome”. But, as you don’t have “discount” keywords for Rome, you still want to appear on the query “Discount Flight to Rome”.

If you don’t use modified broad match well and use this keywords “+Cheap +Flight to +Rome” you will end up loosing the query “Discount Flight to Rome”. To avoid this you should us: “Cheap Flight to +Rome” which will leave some freedom to “Cheap Flight To” but will restrict “Rome” to misspellings and plurals.

Conclusion

In my opinion the “modified broad” match type is an excellent new feature that will help search marketers target more precisely their traffic and therefore be more relevant while remaining able to scale their campaigns and gain a lot of time. On the other hand, if not used well, it could result in complete blindness towards queries that could have been added as keywords and increase your reach.

It is definitely a good additional match type but you should take your time and think about the consequences it can have before implementing it.

Feel free to post your comments below if you agree, disagree or want to complete this post.