Should we trust broad match?
I always loved matching option as it was a way of exploring a linguistic depth of human thinking. It always made you think why people call things different names while the object only got one? Do people put more experience/expectation into the name than its purpose?
Choosing keywords for your PPC campaign is a way of putting yourself in other people’s minds- what will they think when searching for this product or service, therefore accommodating as many keyword variations in your campaign as possible is crucial.
But here is the catch… broad match, which is a keyword default setting.
All three major engines have one and it doesn’t take into consideration a human mind but a mathematical and financial side of the words. Google definition states:
…“it will trigger your ad whenever that keyword or similar term appears in a user's query. This means that your ad will still appear even if:
• Other words are included in the query.
• Terms in the query are not written in the same sequence in your keyword (for example, if your keyword is x, your ad may be triggered by search terms xyz, zx or zyx).
• The query is similar to your keyword. This includes plurals and synonyms. “
My experience in PPC shows that quite specific keywords with a good set of negatives (based on google research tool) are displayed for completely irrelevant searches where only one of the words in keyword phrase is present, and the search query doesn’t have any connection to my ad, which is relevant and has a relevant landing page. Or even worst – my ad is displayed for query which has nothing in common with the ad or product and contains the whole or part of my keyword (based on query report), for example: fasting ad was displayed for “fast & furious” and SMS ad was displayed for “unblock sites” query.
Maybe there is some sort of connection between the two, but Google’s broad match should be based on synonyms & plurals, different order or additional words in the phrase and not on the same sequence of couple of letters in the search query or some other obscure match. It’s not what Google promised us.
If we can’t trust Google on matching options, which are the stepping stones for PPC industry, so should we consider keyword research tool results unreliable and a quality score to be a myth?
