GOOGLE PHRASE MATCH – WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

AN INTEGRAL PART OF PPC ARE KEYWORDS AND MATCH TYPES. WHEN PUTTING OUT A GOOGLE AD, YOU WANT IT TO PERFORM AT OPTIMUM EFFICIENCY, AND THIS IS WHERE MATCH TYPES HAVE ALWAYS WORKED A TREAT. AS WITH EVERYTHING IN THE DIGITAL WORLD, ITS ALL SUBJECT TO CHANGE, AS YOU GROW, WE GROW AND THEY GROW.

Phrase Match is the latest in a long, long line of areas to undergo changes. The best way for us to understand the new Phrase Match is to break down what came before with Match Types.

WHAT ARE MATCH TYPES?

Keyword match types help advertisers decide how accurately their ad words reach their intended audience. For products that have a broader audience, you can create loose word matches that will reach a broader spectrum.

The three areas of interest are:

Fairly self-explanatory, the exact matches and broad matches cover the two opposite ends of the spectrum, with phrase matches catching anything in between.
When setting out your intentions with an advert, you needn’t ponder over every possible question that may be asked to find your product. You can find a happy medium and run at a lower match range, this means broader searches will still see your ad.

WHAT IS NEW WITH PHASE MATCH?

Woah, woaaaah. Hold your horses with all these questions.

I’ll get to it. Firstly, we need to find out about a little number called ‘close variants’. Close variants are groups of associated words that help Google define what correlate with what.These account for abbreviations, synonyms, paraphrases etc.

What close variants do, is give the ad platform scope to switch up your keywords to better fit them to the user query. Any given keyword could have multiple different variables working for it behind the scenes.

There’s a list of the manipulations here:

CAN WE HEAR ABOUT THE NEW PHASE MATCH NOW?

You’ve been patient enough, lets get to it. Phrase Match has now merged with BMM(Broad Match Modifier). The move has been taken to favour Googles machine learning and automation, ultimately giving advertisers more scope in reaching customers as well as saving time. BMM and Phase Match were not too dissimilar,
BMM just had a wider field. By merging the two, and putting more reliance on ML and automation, the functionality now takes a word’s meaning into account, rather than looking for similar words.

ML will also give less consideration to word order as it will be able to distinguish whether the word order really matter (great news for Master Yoda). Whilst seeming restrictive in some respects, the move should simplify data collection for advertisers and give more access to more search inputs. Trust in the machine.

Google has stated that 15% of all searches it receives every day are new searches, so without automation these searches would not be accessible by advertisers.