Salmon is not goose liver: Time to turn off broad matches in Google Adwords?

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

June 7, 2010 [752 views]

I am trying to improve all aspects of my small ecommerce store The Market Quarter and over the last few days, prompted by another client project, I have been reviewing all aspects of my Google PPC advertising.

The Google Adwords programme is excellent; matching searchers’ needs to advertisers keywords. In Market Quarter’s case this means displaying ads for duck confit when a searcher types “buy duck confit” into the Google search box. By writing good ads, creating good landing pages and choosing good keywords I can drive a steady stream of potential customers to my site and make some money.

But what if a customer looking for “whole salmon” is presented with an ad for “fresh foie gras”? This seems to be a “broad match” too far.

Google provides different match types with which an advertiser can control the occasions on which an ad is shown. Exact, phrase and broad matches together with negative keywords allow me to bid on “buy foie gras” (match if the search query contains the phrase) and [buy foie gras] (match if this exact phrase is typed) and until now buy foie gras (if the words I have used are contained in any order in the query - a broad match).

Over the last few years in an effort to improve the results to advertisers or more cynically to boast Google’s profits, the broadness of broad matches has gradually been increased and with it my control of my campaign has been reduced. Indeed if I analyse my advertising last month I can see that £30 of my £47 spend on one campaign has been spent matching broad terms that I did not select. These did produce clicks and thus visitors to Market Quarter but were these people really potential customers or just curious? I might be prepared to carry the additional cost or not but surely it should be for me to decide, not Google.

The entire premise behind search advertising is giving me the advertiser control over the keywords I want to bid upon. And perhaps because lots of advertisers are spotting the broad match problem, Google announced last month a new match type; modified broad matches.

Now by phrasing my keywords as +Buy +Foie +Gras, I can make sure that the phases matched must contain the words I have chosen (in any order). This was what broad matching used to deliver. So in a way we are back to where we started.

What is this project about?

Read the introduction to this series Site Benchmarking, testing and improvement for the MarketQuarter

I would love to hear from others who have performed similar analysis on their own shops or from anyone with questions. Add your comments below or follow @JonathanBriggs on Twitter

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