Exact match

What Are Exact Match Keywords?

A keyword setting that allows your ad to show only when someone searches for your keyword or close variants of your keyword.

That means the person searching is using the exact words you’ve included in your keyword, with that exact word order and without any words before or after. So the exact match keyword [best espresso grinder] only shows for that exact search: best espresso grinder. It wouldn’t show if someone was searching for the best espresso grinder under $200. But if you wanted to include it, you could create a new keyword: [best espresso grinder under $200]. Over the years, Google Ads has started to include a lot of variations of your exact match keywords, what Google calls close variants. One obvious takeaway from these changes is that if one keyword will match with more variations, you don’t need to add that many keywords to your account. This is especially handy for things like misspelled words. But let me show you an example of why most advertisers (including me) weren’t too happy with these changes.

For example, [espresso grinder] would also show up for espresso grinders, the plural form. That might seem like a small difference, but the singular and plural forms of a keyword often have a different performance.

How To Use Exact Match

Exact match has a specific symbol you have to add to your keywords, just put your keyword between square brackets [ ]. Note that the entire keyword needs to be contained in the square brackets, variations of this won’t work as they should.

When To Use Exact Match

While a broad match keyword pulls in all sorts of (un)related keywords, you won’t see many new queries coming from exact match keywords. Here is the search terms report for one of campaigns:

You can see that out of 101 clicks, 74 are for the “pure” exact match, 17 for the singular form and the rest are a handful of other variations. While it gets a lot fewer impressions/clicks, it makes up for in precision. Because the match type is so targeted, it allows you to hone in on interesting keywords: 

•At launch: if keyword research shows a couple of interesting longer tail keywords with enough search volume, I will add them as exact match keywords

•During optimization: if my modified broad match keywords catch interesting search queries with some volume, I will add these as exact or phrase match to my campaigns. Exact Match Impression Share metrics summarize impression calculate impression share as if all keywords were set to exact match.

The phrase “exact match” is commonly used when targeting your ad to types of searches with Google AdWords. Exact match in AdWords means that you only want your ad to show up for a specific word or phrase. (Importantly, AdWords has recently updated how they treat keywords so that word order and “functional words” within a sentence—i.e. “and,” “or,” “but,” “then,” etc. — don’t matter. The same keywords in different sequence, with or without functional words, may still represent an “exact match.”)

Exact or partial match for organic results

This type of fine-tuned control over how your content is dished up in AdWords doesn’t exist for SEOs who are targeting organic search results. Organic rankings are determined solely by Google’s algorithm and its ever-growing understanding of language and intent.

If you want to understand more about how exact and partial match work in the wild, you can force Google to give you exact match organic results by using the quotations marks search operator.

For example, when searching tiny dancing horse without quotation marks, Google dishes up an array of results—from a Moonwalking Dancing Shetland Pony to a Little Ballerina and Her Dancing Horse. The best thing you can do to help your content rank for your keywords is use your target keyword in your title tag and other relevant places and create content that delves into the topic using synonyms, examples, and whatever else you need until you’re satisfied that you have the best content on the block.