- Hey guys, Sam here from KeyCommerce.com.
In this video, you're going to learn
what are keyword match types in Google,
how you can use them, and the theory behind them.
It's really important to know this
to be a better media buyer, a better PVC manager,
and just get more profits out of your campaigns
for your e-commerce store.
So let's just draw an example here.
So we have the Google search results or the search bar.
So you go to google.com like over here,
and you type in the bar like women's shoes.
I wanna buy women's shoes.
Google is then going to present you
the actual search results.
It's gonna have the paid results here
and then the organic results down the bottom.
Now, we care about these paid results of course,
'cause we have a Google ads account.
That's what we're doing,
we're trying to get the paid results.
Well, how does Google decide
if they're going to show your ad
when someone searches for women's shoes?
Well, you probably know this is about your bid.
It's about your quality score, your ad relevancy,
it's all about your ad rank, that's how the auction works.
But how does Google actually know
if you're even going to contribute
or participate in that auction?
Well, Google actually looks at all your keywords.
Looks at the match types for those keywords,
and decides if your ads, your keywords
are eligible to trigger your ads to run in that auction.
So it's really, really important to understand this.
It's the little bit here
that gives us eligibility to run in the auction.
So if someone searches for women's shoes,
we can use a broad match keyword,
I'm gonna go over the different match types in a second.
We can even use exact match women's shoes.
If someone searches for women's shoes,
we're gonna show our ad.
And the different match type we use,
we're gonna use that depending on how free we want
the difference in what people search for
and our keywords to be.
Let me explain this a bit better, I think so.
So this is actually a table provided by Google.
I put a link to this in the description
and it just shows the four different types of match types.
It must've been in the last week or two,
they've actually added a broad match.
That's been around for years,
but they never really,
actually maybe they did provide this.
They don't provide that
when you actually create your keywords in the account,
they don't tell you about this
but this is like the fourth,
was like a secret sort of keyword match type you can use.
I'm gonna go through them all now.
So the first one is broad match.
Google loves if you use broad match
'cause it gives them a lot more control
for you to participate in more ad auctions
than something like exact match.
So imagine this is more free.
This is much more restrictive.
This up here, it gives Google more control,
down here it gives you more control,
and there's benefits of doing both.
But starting off with broad match,
if someone searches for women's hats,
and that's your keyword, in your account, women's hats.
Well then if someone searches for, buy ladies hats,
your ad is gonna show potentially,
it's gonna be eligible to show.
Women's clothing.
See how different, if you sell women's hats
and someone searches for women's clothing,
they're gonna see your ad.
So you need to think, okay, do I really wanna share my ad
if someone is searching for women's clothing,
and maybe you think, oh, that might be a great keyword.
But think about it for a second.
Thinking about the intent there.
Someone's searching for women's clothing,
and it's very, very general.
They might not even know what they want.
It might be someone that doesn't know what they wanna buy
for like their wife or girlfriend or friend or whatever,
so they're searching for just women's clothing
or women's scarfs.
If you only sell hats, you don't sell any scarfs,
but Google's still gonna show.
So broad match has its users because you can use it
if you wanna do a lot of research, discovery campaigns,
where you wanna see what people are searching,
but also it allows you to get longer tail,
more varied search queries for your keywords.
And often a lot of those search queries
are gonna be cheaper.
They're gonna be a lot cheaper than bidding on exact match.
And that's just the way it works.
But going down further, you can use broad match modified.
And how do you actually use it?
So in your account, when you add your keywords,
for broad match, you just put the keyword in there,
just women's hats.
For broad match modified,
you see here, these little symbols,
that's the actual match type symbol,
what you use to tell Google what we're doing.
And you see here, just like I used
this little terrible diagram here,
but basically it's like a little lever that allows you
to choose how you actually, you can pull it and say,
what are the settings that I wanna do in my account
to show for these keywords?
It gives you an element of control,
just like changing your location settings.
This is not changing where people are,
where you're targeting,
but it's what they actually use to search.
And shopping campaigns,
I talk a lot about shopping campaigns on this channel.
You can't use keywords, you can use negative keywords
which operate in a similar way,
but the opposite where it stops
being eligible for that auction
if someone searches for specific things,
but largely Google uses your product feed
to create its own keywords in a sense,
so you can actually choose your keywords.
But for search campaigns, that are on match types.
So the next one is broad match modified.
And this is adding a plus sign.
And you see here that it basically means that
Google can swap around those keywords.
So it can have hats women, or that's an actual thing,
but it can also add some more variation
but not as much variation as the broad match.
This is what a lot of media buyers
have used for a long time
and they've avoided using broad match,
just because it does give a bit more relevancy,
a bit more control because you'll see here,
women scarfs and hats.
So hats have to be in the search group.
That you're no longer showing for just women scarfs,
but women scarfs and hats, then you're gonna show.
So these all have hats, here they all have hats.
You can have sort of a bit of variation of the word hats,
but largely it's all about that
but it also adds other other terms
in and around the different terms.
Now, this is compared to phrase match down here
which is using these quotes.
I don't actually know the exact word for that
but women's hats in quotes.
Basically that means that women's hats
has to be there together as a one thing.
They've actually changed it.
So this is something else I've gotta go over.
So they've actually, and this has made
a lot of people really upset,
that they've changed the the rule here
where closed variations can,
synonyms can be substituted in there.
This made a lot of people really angry,
because it's Google's way of just taking more control back.
So that's why this one here, ladies hats on sale,
but they've got the synonym of ladies for women's,
and put that in there.
A lot of people, they don't care about that,
but a lot of diehard old school media buyers,
that's a big deal, but don't worry about that too much
but you'll see here how they put that in there as well.
So you see here, it's getting close more and more.
The main point here to think about, to see,
is that here it's so much more general.
Women scarfs, women's clothing.
And as you get further down here,
it gets much more about the hats and about women, okay?
It gets much more specific.
And then when you get down to the very bottom
which is exact match, which is in these square brackets,
that's when it's much more targeted towards women's hats.
Women's hats, ladies hats, hats for women, hats women.
See, doesn't have buy, it doesn't have blue,
doesn't have on sale.
No, that exact match is very specific.
And so you see here that spectrum
of super broad, all the way down to exact
where this gives Google more control
so they can start showing you for all these other queries.
And then down here, it's getting much more specific.
Okay, so when would you actually use this
for your e-commerce store?
This is really, really important
because I have seen some campaigns
with super broad succeed amazingly,
but that did take time to let Google
do a lot of optimization
especially with an automated bidding strategy.
But a lot of people, especially in a competitive niche,
they love to use exact match or phrase match just because
maybe there's a high volume of searches already,
so they're not worried
about being limited by the total volume of searches,
but also the keywords are much more expensive.
So they wanna make sure when they get a click,
they're getting certain people,
there's a whole market of people searching.
And those clicks can be very expensive.
They only want blue hats, blue women's hats.
That's all they want 'cause maybe that's all they sell.
So if someone searches for red women's hats,
they don't want that.
They only want blue women's hats
and they don't have the budget to spend on red hat searches,
only blue hats.
Do you see here?
It basically allows you to keep that control
and have a stronger lever
on what exactly you want for those search clues.
Now, why would you even use match types in the first place?
Well, this is the real theory underneath all of this
that I need to communicate really clearly
is that the search query that someone uses
indicates their intent.
So someone's searching for buy hats for women,
that has very high intent, bottom of the funnel,
they're looking to buy hats online.
Someone's searching for just women's clothing.
That could be someone searching
for some like a school project.
It could be someone that's
just looking for random gift ideas
and they're just looking around.
Maybe they just wanna know
what women's clothing looks like.
You see here, it's really hard to tell the intent.
You can get an idea but the more, certain keywords
or certain queries are gonna give you a better idea
of what that person wants when they're searching.
And this is the real power behind Google
is that when someone searches for women's hats,
you see here even all the different,
certainly the suggestions here, Kmart,
I'm in Australia right now.
So Kmart, that's in the US as well, but there's shops here.
There's Australian location, another shop for big heads.
So they're looking for size, looking for like all.
So that's definitely not a good,
unless you're selling like old school hats,
even then people searching for women's hats 1900 or 1890s,
maybe they're looking to go to a fancy dress party,
or maybe they're doing some project
or they're just interested,
they've watched some YouTube video about past or something.
And they're like, I wonder
what women wore as a hat back then.
So this tells you about the intent.
But if I just searched for women's hats, of course,
there's gonna be people bidding on the shopping.
You've got people bidding on the search.
So these people here, whatever they put in there,
they're using match types to show their search ahead
for this query.
And if I search for 1900, see, there's no more ads.
Maybe there's some ads maybe later, but even Google knows
that from its own data, it knows, okay,
maybe we shouldn't show as to this guy
or wherever it is searching
because someone searching for that usually doesn't purchase,
they're just looking for something like this,
that's why they're showing you all these designs
and images and stuff like that.
So while Google uses their own data,
we also wanna take control as well
and use match types to decide for ourselves.
So guys, that's how match types work.
So back to this diagram, it allows us to control
for which search queries that someone searches in here,
when do we actually show our ads?
And another part that I haven't spoken about is
the reason this exists is because it's efficient,
because if Google said, okay,
I believe this is actually what Google ads was like
before it was called Google ads back in the very early days,
where you had to ring up and say,
I wanna bid on these different keywords,
someone correct me if I'm wrong.
But now that's where,
I've been speaking to someone that had been around
for a very long time.
That was like a long time before me,
and that's like 2000 or whenever it was.
But you had to ring up and say, I wanna bid on this keyword.
And it was very, very manual process.
Well, imagine if, especially if you've got a store
that's doing six, seven figures on Google ads per month,
and we're working with those sort of stores,
it would take so long to do all the media buying
'cause every single keyword,
cause there are so many variations of all the keywords,
even just spelling mistakes.
It allows you to show your ads for those crews
even if you don't know those queries exist yet.
And that's really important
because the market's always changing.
But also you can't think
like you don't know every single search term
that your customers are gonna use.
That takes a lot of years and years of market research.
And even then it's changes over time.
So this actually is a really good thing.
Anyway, guys, that's how match types work in Google ads.
I hope that was helpful.
If this video was helpful,
please let me know in the comments below.
Give it a like, check out my other videos.
I do a lot of videos on Google search,
Google shopping ads and growing your e-commerce store.
Thanks for watching guys and I'll see you in the next one.
Bye for now.
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