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Broad Matched Keywords - A Good Strategy?
12 November 2008
by
admin
Filed under
Google
There is an interesting post today on the Inside Adwords Blog regarding the use of broad matched keywords. Unsuprisingly, Google is promoting the use of broad match keywords in PPC campaigns, the title of the blog pretty much confirms this before you even have a chance to read it..”Reach more customers with broad match“. However I think this prophecy that the use of Broad match is always inherently a good strategy is too much of a sweeping generalisation. This is because your matching strategy should be formulated according to the type of keywords you are bidding on, the relative CPC’s and your daily budget.
For example for an advertiser with a limited budget in a highly competitive industry it may not make sense to bid on broad match when the budget could be better spend on exact and or phrased matched keywords. The CTR and probably conversion rate will be higher on the exact and phrased matched terms. The quality score will also build up much quicker, lowering the average CPC.
Budget
On the other hand if you have a very substantial PPC budget, it DOES make sense to run on broad for the first few weeks to ascertain all of the derivative search queries and negative terms which can then be added to boost the CTR on the broad matched terms. I once worked on a campaign with a £1,000 daily budget, and I had one search term on broad match, with hundreds of negatives. I got a great CTR of circa £7% and also good conversions - but this keyword was eating about £300 a day. Sometimes I have run campaigns without using broad match at all because using phrase and exact match was working so well. Because the budget was maxing out each day it made no sense to venture into broad match territory.
One interesting quote from the blog is that “broad match currently accounts for over 1/3 of all clicks and conversions for advertisers, worldwide.” Does this mean that there are a lot of unoptimised PPC campaigns globally? A third of conversions from broad match doesnt give you an insight into the conversion rate at which these conversions are being achieved (historically low on broad match). Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that broad match is universally bad, just that it should be used sparingly and only when the budget is exhausted on phrase and exact match.
