Match type

A match type is the rule that decides how far a search can drift from your keyword and still trigger your advert. It is set on the keyword itself, and it is the difference between appearing for what you asked for and appearing for whatever Google believes you meant.

In short

• It controls how loosely your keyword is read, not what you bid.
• There are three of them, and none of them are literal any more.
• The wrong one spends the budget on searches nobody chose.
• The search terms report is the only place you see what it did.

What the setting actually controls

Search advertising works by bidding on words rather than on people. You give Google a keyword, somebody types something into the search box, and Google decides whether the two are close enough to put your advert in the auction.

The match type is that decision rule. It does not change your bid, your budget, your advert or your landing page. It changes only one thing: the size of the net.

This is easy to underestimate because the effect is invisible in most reports. A campaign summary shows spend and clicks by keyword, and the keyword always looks like what you asked for. The searches that were actually paid for sit in a different report entirely.

The three types

Every keyword sits in one of three settings, written with different punctuation.

• Broad match. Written plain, with no punctuation. The widest net. It catches related searches, adjacent topics and things it judges to share your intent, whether or not your words appear at all.
• Phrase match. Written in quotation marks. It catches searches that carry the meaning of your keyword, with words allowed before and after it.
• Exact match. Written in square brackets. The tightest, and still not literal. It catches searches Google reads as the same intent, which includes plurals, misspellings, reorderings and words it treats as equivalent.

The names are older than the behaviour. All three have loosened over the years, and exact match in particular no longer means what a new advertiser reasonably assumes it means. Read them as tight, medium and wide rather than as promises.

Where the money goes wrong

Loose matching fails in a specific and repeatable way. A dental clinic bidding broadly on a treatment starts appearing for people researching the treatment, people looking for training in it, people looking for it in another city and people who wanted to know what it costs somewhere else entirely. Every one of those clicks is charged at the same rate as a genuine one.

The damage shows up in this order.

• Cost per result climbs while the number of clicks looks healthy.
• Conversion rate falls, because the traffic answering the advert was not looking for what the advert offered.
• The advert itself gets less relevant, since one advert is now answering several different questions.
• Quality Score drops, which makes every future click on that keyword more expensive.

The last one is the reason loose matching is worth catching early. A campaign that spends badly for a month does not merely lose that month. It leaves the account in a slightly worse position than it started.

Choosing, and then checking

There is no correct match type in the abstract. There is only a match type that suits how much you know.

Tight matching is right when you already know which searches matter, when the budget is small enough that a wasted click is felt, and when the account has no conversion history for anything to learn from. This describes most businesses starting out.

Loose matching earns its place when conversions are tracked properly, when there is enough volume for a bidding strategy to find a pattern, and when a negative keyword list is already holding back the obvious rubbish. Loose matching without those three is not discovery. It is a subsidy.

Whichever you choose, the checking is the same and it is not optional. The search terms report inside Google Ads lists what people actually typed, beside what it cost. Read it, add negatives for what does not belong, and note the searches that came up repeatedly and converted. Those are the ones that deserve a keyword of their own.

Match type and negatives are one setting

Match type and negative keywords are usually managed as separate jobs, and they are two halves of the same control.

The match type opens the net. The negative list closes the parts of it you do not want. Loosening one without extending the other is the version that goes wrong without announcing itself, because the widening happens immediately and the discovery of what came through happens whenever somebody next opens a report.

A workable habit is to treat them as a single change. Every time a keyword is loosened, read the search terms that arrived over the following fortnight and add negatives for the categories that clearly do not belong. Three categories account for most of it: people looking for free versions or instructions, people looking for a job rather than a service, and people looking in a place you do not serve.

The last one matters more in the Philippines than in a smaller market. A business serving Cebu City will catch searches from Metro Manila and Davao on almost any loosened keyword, and location settings alone will not stop it, because somebody in one city can search for a service in another. The words themselves have to be excluded.

Words you will hear

• Search term. What somebody actually typed, as opposed to what you bid on.
• Close variant. A search Google treats as equivalent to your keyword, including plurals, misspellings and reorderings.
• Negative keyword. A word that stops your advert appearing, regardless of match type.
• Search terms report. The list of what your keywords caught.
• Broad match modifier. An older, tighter version of broad match that no longer exists. Ignore advice that still recommends it.

Match type is one of the few settings in an account where the default is not the safe option. Set it deliberately for every keyword in every ad group, then read the search terms report often enough that you find out what you agreed to before the invoice does.