And the #1 budget killer, without question, is the broad phrase keyword match.
That’s right – the broad phrase keyword match will drain your credit card faster than you ever realized possible. And of course, as your credit card is hemorrhaging, Google is getting paid every bloody cent.
Here’s an example of a broad phrase match keyword compared to phrase match and exact match:
broad phrase match = red tennis shoes
phrase match = “red tennis shoes”
exact match = [red tennis shoes]
Now I’m not going to get into the difference between all three because I want to help you fully understand the dangers with broad phrase match.
Broad phrase match is the most commonly used matching type. In fact, it’s the default setting by Google if you don’t specify a matching type (go figure right…)
In the example above (red tennis shoes) – broad phrase match means there are no parenthesis or brackets around the phrase. And without any constraints – which is what broad phrase match means – then your ad is going to pop up for all of the following search variations (meaning, these are the keywords that would trigger your ads when someone typed them into the search bar):
tennis
shoes
red tennis shoes
tennis shoes
red tennis
shoes tennis
tennis
and whatever other combination that can be derived from these 3 words.
Do you see the huge problem here? Your ad, with a broad phrase match, is going to be triggered when someone searches any individual word in the phrase, plus any combination and any order of words within the phrase.
So if you’re selling red tennis shoes, do you really want your ad showing when someone types in the word “tennis”? Maybe, but if you’re like 99% of advertisers, you don’t have the money to get clicks from people that aren’t as targeted as absolutely possible.
And with broad phrase match, your ads will be popping up all over the place, and getting completely random clicks from non targeted prospects.
And of course, Google is getting seriously paid from all of the broad phrase matching that’s going on – in fact, I would argue (can’t prove this) that the majority of Google’s click revenue comes directly from broad phrase matched keywords.
Why else would they have broad phrase matching as the Google Adwords default settings for keywords?