SEM Beginner Series: The Relationship Between Keyword Match Types and Search Queries

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Welcome to the final contribution to our SEM Beginner series, a collection of posts from our friends at Microsoft intended for those new to search engine marketing. If you are looking for some guidance to help identify, monitor and adjust the key performance indicators (KPIs) that determine how successful a PPC campaign is, guest blogger Tina Kelleher, SMB Community Manager at Microsoft, has the answers. 

What is a Match Type?

Match type refers to how your keywords are matched to search queries. There are 3 different match types, Exact, Phrase and Broad:

Exact: If you select only Exact match for your keywords, your ads will only display when the keywords entered by a searcher on Bing match exactly with the keywords in your Microsoft adCenter campaign. If you have “small blue widgets” in your keyword list, that’s what a user must enter as their search query for your ad to appear.

Phrase: If you select only Phrase match, your ads will display if the user’s query contains a keyword or phrase from your keyword list.  Someone searching on “cheap small blue widgets” will see your ad.

Broad: If you select only Broad match, your ads will display if any keyword or part of a keyphrase is contained in the searcher’s query, so someone looking for “small cheap blue and red widgets” will see your ad.

For maximum coverage, it’s a best practice to bid across all three match types to ensure your ads show as often as possible. As time passes and data accumulates in your campaign, you can always review your adCenter reports (be sure to add the “Delivered match type” column) and adjust your strategy based on which match types have the highest click-through rate (CTR).

Match Types and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Match types themselves are not key performance indicators, but they are one of the options that can be tweaked to help remedy issues with KPIs, such as low CTR, low traffic and high cost-per-clicks (CPCs).  

For more detailed information, visit Lauren Taft-McPhee’s post on Keyword Match Types or Hana Ondrusek’s post, Understanding How Match Types Affect Your PPC Campaigns in adCenter. Be sure to keep checking back here as I’ll discuss match types in greater detail in the new SEM Intermediate Series of posts that begins next week.