I recently struggled with using Google AdWords' broad match (not in connection with this) and decided to contact two of the people I respect most on Pay-Per-Click advertising: Andrew Goodman and Amy Konefal.

My problem stemmed from the fact that I was relying on the explanation of broad match in Andrew's book, which is now outdated (the new version is due out later this year, and likely in the fall, per Andrew). Google has since introduced "expanded broad match." My apologies to everyone who's already familiar with this and knows how it works. For everyone else, you're about to get an A-Grade lesson from two pros.

Andrew is the Principal of Page Zero ("Extra-Stength PPC") Media and well-known author behind Winning Results With Google AdWords. Amy is the Director of Paid Search at Closed Loop Marketing, and I had the good fortune to hear her on the PPC Pitfalls panel at SMX West and chat her with afterwards (another good reason to sign up for a search conference like the upcoming SMX Social, SEM Canada, or SES Toronto).

Expanded Broad Match

What expanded broad match means is that any word in your broad match phrase can trigger your ad's appearance, and so can synonyms. So if you advertise on "Great Lakes vacation," your ad can show up for "Great post by Gab Goldenberg," "Throw Gab Goldenberg into multiple lakes," or "take a vacation from Gab's presence." And for the synonyms, "awesome way to beat that punk 20 year old over the head" would match for "Great." Just one of the things I learned from Amy's presentation. :D

To get a better handle on when, why, and how this occurs, I'll happily leave the floor to Andrew and Amy. My initial question to Andrew was as follows:

At SMX Advanced, one of the presentations [Amy's] highlighted that if you use broad match in AdWords with a multiple word phrase, any keyword in the phrase could trigger your ad. For example, broad matching 'purple crayons' would trigger your ad for 'purple grapes,' 'makeup crayons,' and 'purple scarves'. And I seem to have seen that myself, as I was advertising my blog's RSS feed lately on 'free seo' and had a click for 'free clip art' in my logs (no way I rank organically for that).

Yet I was re-reading Winning Results recently, and you wrote (p. 213; ch 9 Expanding Your Ad Distribution Opportunities and Pitfalls): "Enter 20-30 two word broad match combinations[...] The fact that the second word needs to appear in the user's query will reduce the potential distribution enough to make the ad highly targeted[...]" So which is it? Has AdWords changed broad match since the time you wrote the book? Am I missing something? I'd like to use broad match but I don't want to pay for ridiculous clicks like what happened with 'free clip art'... 

(Andrew Goodman at SES, originally from SE Roundtable, pic by Tamar.)

Andrew's response:

"The two-word broad match technique STILL WORKS WELL to get advertisers focusing better on the 'torso' of the keyword graph, but admittedly, it needs to be reconciled with the fact that all broad matching does potentially trigger expanded broad match. Expanded broad match can behave unpredictably, as many people have noted, but Google isn't trying to make it suck, of course! By and large, Google is at least as concerned with targeting as the advertiser.

"Certainly, to be more cautious, two word phrase matches would be more precise and not trigger expanded broad matching. Expanded broad matching is a bit of a black box, and the playing field is subject to change. Using it requires extra effort with negatives if you want more precision.

[Ed: Can bids affect how much you're subject to Expanded Broad Match?]

"Among other things, rumor has it that it is more likely to trigger 'more expanded' broad matches if you are bidding very high. That's logical enough. An agency wants more volume, they don't seek precision, and they crank bids from $3.00 to $8.00. The system will then 'go out and find' more ad inventory, responding to that cue.

"The monthly budget optimizer, which I never use and don't like, works on a similar principle.

"Recently though, Google has experimented in limited beta with an even worse idea - trying to spend your unspent budget by making your PHRASE MATCHED terms turn into broad and expanded broad matching, to 'help' you spend your budget. Needless to say, this is a terrible idea and is misleading to advertisers who keep their budgets maxed so they don't underspend on the highly efficient accounts they have built for their own purposes."

[Down to details]

"But to be specific for a second, you're not supposed to show up for 'purple scarves' if you have a broad match term purple grapes. The matching is supposed to be semantically similar stuff, not hog wild anything goes. So, maybe purple fruit or purple vines, but not scarves.

"I like to use the analogy of concentric circles of meaning; if you bid low on an expanded broad match eligible term, Google might reach out to the first band on the target to give you matches with similar verb stems, plurals, and misspellings. It might reach out a bit more if you bid a bit higher, so that 'lawn care' might find you a match with 'garden products.' But if you bid very high, who knows, maybe it'll take anything it can find, like 'green lawn' matching to 'the longest yard' and 'yard glass.' They are barely related at all, but there seems to be some statistical connection in the meaning map, so it's the worst case scenario of expanded broad matching.

"Anyway, Google doesn't disclose everything, but if you've watched their keyword tool over the years (some versions have been pretty eye-opening), that's kind of how you can tell what Google knows about in terms of vaguely related words, so that's roughly how I think expanded broad matching works.

"Google acquired semantic matching technology from Applied Semantics. Their method was a 'meaning map' method of building statistical correlations among terms. Google has been building that technology, using mounds of real user data, for the past 6 years."

[Ed: Andrew and his team are holding their first ever Page Zero Marketing Seminar in Toronto on May 15. If you have any clients or colleagues who would benefit from an intensive half-day on paid search, check out their seminar.]

Amy's response (and follow up):

"Winning Results with Google AdWords is a great resource. However, it was written back when Broad Match was much more targeted and narrow – before the days of ‘Expanded Broad Match’. So now synonyms and familial words will be broad matched to (i.e., the words you bid on do not need to appear in the user’s query for you to show up).

"It can be really frustrating – sorry to hear about the ‘free clip art’ click. A lot of people don’t realize how liberal the Expanded Broad Match algorithms have become. I mean, seriously, they got ‘free clip art’ from ‘free SEO’? That’s crazy – that isn’t even synonymous or familial I would say. This is quite common, unfortunately.

"We’re all hoping that Google will eventually give people the option to use the old Broad Match, and only add on ‘Expanded’ Broad Match as a separate option. No luck with that so far."

So are high bids the culprits?

It's happened to a friend of Amy's "who is spending $30/day with bids from $.10-.50. Don’t get me wrong, when you’re spending that little we’re talking about a bad click here and a bad click there. But for a small company with not much to spend, the accumulation of bad clicks can take a toll…"

[How to Succeed With AdWords' Expanded Broad Match]

"That all said, I’m definitely not adamantly against Broad Match – we use it for a lot of our clients and it can be quite profitable. It just has to be madly monitored and refined to make sure you’re getting more out of it than you’re losing from it.

"We recently performed an audit for a Fortune 100 company (that I referenced in the SMX presentation) regarding PPC campaigns set up by another SEM agency. In our audit, we found that Broad Match was a large culprit for inefficient spend, among many other problems.

"Just by having a better account structure with a more robust, targeted keyword list and a more robust negative list, the wasted spend has been drastically reduced (even though the majority of the keyword are still on Broad). Orders, revenue, CTR, conversion rates, and coverage levels have increased dramatically. So from here, in terms of Broad Match issues, we’re monitoring the Search Query reports weekly to weed out the junk that is coming through and keep increasing effective spend and ROI as a result.

"IMO, an advertiser is just asking for it when they broad match very general terms. This is largely why the old account was such a mess, among many other problems – and why $109K in wasted spend can accumulate if you aren’t being responsible on Broad Match.

"Just to clarify, I do strongly believe that Andrew is right that the impact will be much greater if an advertiser is bidding high and spending a lot. I would imagine, based on our experience and Andrew’s explanation, that those who are most susceptible are companies who are bidding high, spending a lot, have a sparse negative strategy in place, and a poor account structure (the last 2 being big culprits that we see happening when we audit).

That said, advertisers who are bidding and spending more reasonably (lower) are certainly not completely immune to the problems of expanded broad matching by any means."

Post-script Aside : If you prefer, SEP has dreamed up a potentially far more interesting conference.

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

- Isaac Newton