Money Rail: PPC Myth Busting! Myth 5: Broad Match Isn’t Worth Pursuing

I have to admit that I’m guilty of buying into this myth myself. I’ll be setting up a new campaign with super strict cost per acquisition goals, and think “I just can’t afford to waste money on broad!”.

This might be a good strategy to begin with, but what happens when you’ve finished building your account, you’re hitting cost goals, but your volume is teeny tiny? This is where broad match comes in and saves the day. If you’re looking for expansion and you don’t have broad match keywords, this is your first stop. If you’re starting a new account with volume as the key performance indicator, then this should be your first stop as well.

Broad match keywords should go into their own campaigns ideally, and at least ad groups, because there’s a good chance they’ll have a worse quality score than your phrase and exact match keywords. You don’t want your campaign or ad group quality scores to bring down the rest of your keywords in that campaign or ad group. You should also make sure to include all the phrase and exact match versions of your broad keywords as negatives to ensure you’re not getting a lot of cross traffic and dirtying up your data. Then, you want to do frequent search query reports immediately after implementing your broad matches. Well, maybe not immediately since it’ll probably take a bit for the search queries to actually show up, but as soon as they’re available! Use the SQRs to find converting keywords to add in and to find crappy keywords to block.

By targeting synonyms and related searches, you could find a whole slew of keywords that you hadn’t thought of targeting before that work for your account. And, I should also note, modified broad match is a really lovely match type. If you haven’t got broad or modified broad keywords in your account and you just can’t get over the anxiety behind bidding on broad match keywords, I would highly suggest adding modified broad match keywords in first. They’ll have better metrics than broad, for sure, but you’re still losing those synonyms and related searches you’ll get with broad. It might get you used to the broad match waters enough to dive in without the anchors of modified broad at a later time.

So, client example! Using a date range of June first to August 20th, I did a pivot table using keywords as the row label with sum of cost and sum of conversions, and then calculating the CPA. I found broad match keywords accounted for 51% of conversions in the account and had only a 16.73% higher CPA. So, ideally, I’d start cutting that % of conversions down by adding these keywords being triggered by broad match that are converting as exact or phrase matches in order to cut the overall CPA down, but I think these numbers show how much broad match keywords can increase your overall volume.

If you’re looking for more myths to bust, check out myths 1-4!

Analytics is complicated to use

Display is really expensive

Display is terrible for direct response

adCenter isn’t worth my time