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When Should I Use Phrase Match?

The Best Practices section of Clickable University includes a detailed discussion of keyword matching options, but it wouldn't hurt to review the basics before turning to a discussion of the "phrase match" option.

There are three kinds of match type: "broad", "phrase", and "exact".

• Broad Match: If you set your keywords to "broad match", your ads will be triggered by searches that include your keywords, as well as searches that include synonyms of your keywords, singular and plural forms, and other variants of your keyword.
• Phrase Match: Slightly more targeted than "broad match". If you set your keywords to "phrase match", your ads will be triggered by searches that include your keywords in the same order in the search phrase. (So if you're bidding on "running shoes," "brown running shoes" would work, but "shoes for running" wouldn't.)
  
• Exact Match: This is the most precise form of targeting. If you set your keyword to "exact match", only searches for exactly that keyword will trigger your ad.

The advantages of Broad Match and Exact Match are easy to state. As we put it in our Best Practices tutorial on the topic, "Exact match allows you to target users very precisely and cheaply because it limits the searchers who will see your ads. Broad match, on the other hand, displays your ads to a wider audience, but this will result in more irrelevant clicks."

Well, what about Phrase Match?

To understand the advantages of Phrase Match, it’s important to understand just how “broad” Broad Match can be. Saying that your ads may be triggered by “synonyms” of your Broad Match keywords is true, but not the entire story. For instance, if you are bidding on the broad match keyword “shoe”, your ads will be triggered by searches on “shoe” (the exact keyword), “shoes” (a grammatical variation) and “sneakers” (a synonym). However, Google also makes the (deliberately vague) claim that ads can be triggered by “other variants” of your keywords, and this is where Broad Match gets very broad.

Ads for the broad match keyword “flower” might be triggered by a search for “tulips” (not a synonym, but a specific type). Sometimes the variants can be way off: one user searched for the term “flights” and saw an ad for a new Apple laptop--the Macbook Air.

Examples like this make it clear just how careful you need to be when bidding on broad match keywords, and being careful means maintaining a very complete list of negative keywords. (Anybody trying to sell the Macbook Air, for instance, will need to add “-flights” as a negative keyword.) But what if you want basic grammatical variations - especially plurals - without having to add them one by one as exact match keywords, and without having to worry about negative keywords quite yet? This is where Phrase Match comes in.

Most discussion of Phrase Match centers around questions of word order. If your phrase is “leather boots,” for instance, your ads will be triggered by the queries “brown leather boots” or “leather boots sale,” but not the query “boots of spanish leather,” because in that phrase the words “leather” and “boots” are in a different order and other words appear in between.

Less widely discussed, and often misrepresented, is that using phrase match keywords is an easy way to include basic grammatical variants - especially plurals - in your ad groups. If you don’t want to go through the hassle of adding every variant one-by-one as an exact match keyword, and you’re not quite ready to deal with the possible dangers of broad match keywords, use phrase match. Phrase match doesn’t directly catch plurals, but they’re included in most instances because the singular phrase is usually contained in the plural. Because the phrase “used car” is included in the phrase “used cars,” for instance, bidding on the phrase match keyword “used car” will give you both the singular and the plural. (Thanks to MediaFlint for the example.) The one thing to watch out for is irregular plurals, such as “goose/geese,” “alumnus/alumni,” “criterion/criteria” or “woman/women.” You’ll still need to add those individually.

With phrase match, you’ll catch the basic variants, but you won’t need to worry about really extended matches. Best yet, it’s the Clickable default.

Hanny, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. “Clickable Gurus” participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

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Several posts ago, Hanny provided us with an excellent overview of the three match types available to

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As if keyword selection wasn't enough work, you need to set a “match type” for every