Keyword Match Type | Exact Match

Exact match keywords are surrounded in square brackets – for example [shoes for women].

Keyword matching example – [shoes for women] exact match:

 Your ads can show up for “shoes women” even without the ‘for’ as it is implied.

‘women shoes’ will trigger your ad. There is a word order difference, but the intent is the same.

‘women shoe’ will trigger your ad because Google will handle the singular and plural versions of you keywords and unlike negative keywords you do not need to define singular and plural versions.

‘shoes for a woman’ will trigger your ad because of the same intent and meaning.

 

Your ad will NOT show:

When the query is ‘women tennis shoes’ because there is no ‘tennis’ in your keyword.

Your ad will NOT trigger for the query ‘shoes for kids’ because the age group and product category is different.

 

Exact match is more precise and targeted than phrase match, and phrase match is more targeted than broad match. One keyword strategy you can apply is to only use phrase and exact match versions of your keywords in each of your ad groups. And leave out broad match because broad match is too loose. This approach will filter out junk traffic and ensure you get more targeted traffic.

You should always test first and if you are not getting enough traffic, you can loosen up and include broad match keyword. 

 

 

 

Why did ‘Exact Match’ become not exactly exact?

We believe that Google does not just want us to spend money, but to generate more results. We need to be open and trust Google’s decision on this since this was not an overnight idea. They have the smartest people on board and all these changes are after decades of big data. They understand searcher intent much better than any of us can ever imagine and they have conversion data.

We might think that we are giving away some degree of control, but the truth is we still have control in the negative match feature. It becomes our responsibility to review the actual search terms that trigger our ads and determine whether those search terms contain words that need to be negatived out.

We tend to think too narrowly to what constitutes a qualified conversion, but these changes are helping us instead of hurting us. Google is trying to help us convert at a lower cost and to have a larger market than we intended without affecting the quality of the conversions.