This is one of the biggest problem areas for Google Adwords campaigns and which comes up most often when we review them as part of our Google Adwords audits.
Most accounts we see include a list of keywords and search phrases that clients thought accurately describe their products and services. However, we are very often able to demonstrate that the impact of Google’s expansion of broad match has widened the number of search phrases that trigger their adverts far beyond what was expected.
Most advertisers know that broad match can actively assist them find alternative versions of searches (for example misspellings and “long tail” search terms) – what they don’t appreciate is that Google would find variations of search with expanded (non optional) broad match that they actually would want to exclude.
As an example, take an advertiser who wants to run adverts against a certain type of print cartridge (say the Epson T009 and not the T011). Even though the campaign only includes keywords containing “T009”, he will find that the adverts will still run against search phrases for the T011 (because of the way that Google uses expanded broad match).
Yes, you can always use negative keywords to exclude terms and lessen the impact of expanded broad match (as we do), but that may be difficult to achieve easily as the negatives may be great in number (as with the above example). All of which have to be defined and loaded into Adwords before they can be screened out – that can take time.
The alternative (and sometimes complementary) strategy is to only run certain campaigns with phrase and exact match keywords – yes, some you will miss some of the long tail keywords, but on the other hand your adverts will only be shown on what you know are valid searches. Using Analytics or your server logs can provide a very fertile start of a good keyword list in which you may find that the use of broad match can be very restrained.
We are now very careful about when and where we use broad match in competitive advertising situations.
Just be aware of this when you create those tightly crafted targeted keyword lists, and then use the Broad Match option.