Phrase match

What is Phrase Match?

Phrase match is a keyword matching option whereby Google matches your ad only against keywords that include a phrase you designate. Google defines the phrase matching option as: Phrase Match – If you enter your keyword in quotation marks, as in “tennis shoes,” your ad would be eligible to appear when a user searches on the phrase tennis shoes, in this order, and possibly with other terms before or after the phrase. For example, your ad could appear for the query red tennis shoes but not for shoes for tennis, tennis shoe, or tennis sneakers. Phrase match is more targeted than broad match, but more flexible than exact match. Note: In 2014, Google introduced “close variants.” This change allows your ads to match to keyword search strings that don’t exactly match your defined phrase. For example, Google may change the order of the words in the phrase or include a plural or synonym if it deems the search in question to be close enough to your phrase. So why is all this important? Because sometimes Google’s broad match and expanded broad match are too broad, and at the same time their exact matching option is somewhat limiting. Broad match will show your ads against all kinds of queries. Let’s take a look at some of the queries Google’s keyword research tool considers “related” to this phrase: Any of these keywords could be considered irrelevant for my landing page about tennis shoes.

Why Use Phrase Match Instead of Exact Match?

The exact matching option will show your ad against only the phrase “tennis shoes”. But by matching only to tennis shoes, I’m missing out on a LOT of traffic. In fact, I’m cutting off what’s known as the “long tail of search“.

I won’t see phrases like:

•buy tennis shoes

•best tennis shoes

•nike tennis shoes

These are great phrases! “Buy tennis shoes” might be one of my most conversion-friendly terms! And phrase match is certainly a more efficient means of targeting all of those different variations than trying to think of and type them all out by hand (there could thousands or even millions of useful variations).

A Phrase Match Alternative: Keyword Discovery and Negative Keywords

Well, what we want to do is find all the different variations I should be bidding on, and at the same time make sure that I’m not bidding on things that don’t make sense for my offering.

The answer here is a suite of tools that allows me to:

Keep broad match on – This way I can discover new variations of the keywords I’m bidding on. In fact, it should really allow me to record all these variations with a Web analytics portion, so that I can bid on more specific keywords and be more relevant (raising my Quality Score and click-through rates). Discover negative keyword opportunities – The negative keyword matching option allows me to keep my ad from showing against various queries. This is a powerful weapon against the sort of irrelevant traffic we discussed above.

This would mean that I could simultaneously:

•Reach the audience I want my ad in front of

•Avoid spending money on uninterested clicks

What Is the New Phrase Match?

So match types have gotten more complicated. What does phrase match look like now?By today’s definition, “Ads may show on searches that include the meaning of the keyword which can be implied, and user searches can be a more specific form of the meaning.”

The big shift is that it’s no longer about words in the keyword, but what those words mean.

Meaning has replaced keywords.

For phrase match, the meaning of the keyword needs to be part of the query — but there can be additional text in the query.

Any references to word order, which used to be part of the original definition of phrase, are gone. Because Google’s machine learning is now good enough to be able to distinguish whether the word order matters, it is no longer necessary to always maintain a strict word order.

This sounds a lot like the original broad match. But broad match itself has also evolved and can now show ads for related searches, even if their meaning is different.

The following table explains the differences between the match types and will help show where phrase match fits relative to broad and exact.