How Exact Match Keywords Can Kill Your Quality Score

Paid Media / December 15, 2008

Using a combination of keyword match types in PPC advertising is crucial to getting the best results. Broad matched keywords allow you to cast a wider net while phrase and exact matched keywords help you refine and filter out unwanted traffic.

But simply including all keyword match types in your campaigns for each and every keyword will not always make sense to do. You might actually find that broad or phrase matched keywords outperform exact match keywords and bring in better quality traffic on the same keywords. How so? Let’s take a couple of examples using AdWords:

EXAMPLE 1

Let’s say you sell blue suede shoes and bid on all keyword match types of blue suede shoes as follows: blue suede shoes, “blue suede shoes”, [blue suede shoes]. By looking at your Search Query Report or web analytics software, you might discover that you are getting traffic for people looking for the song “Blue Suede Shoes” made popular by Elvis. So you add in negative keywords like “elvis”, “song”, “lyrics”, “cd”, etc. to filter out people searching for the song and not actually the shoes you sell.

But these negative keywords won’t help you eliminate this traffic if you’re using the exact match keyword [blue suede shoes] since negative keywords don’t impact exact matched keywords and you’ll be getting impressions and even traffic for both people looking for the shoes you sell as well as the famous song. So you might be better off not using the exact match variation of this keyword as targeted as it might seem to your product.

EXAMPLE 2

Let’s say you repair Toshiba photocopiers and run a campaign with keywords like “repair toshiba”. You might find that your click through (CTR) and conversion rates are doing well on the broad repair Toshiba and phrase “repair toshiba” keywords but not on the exact matched [repair toshiba]. Especially if you have in place a good list of negative keywords to filter out people searching for repair services for Toshiba products you don’t offer like “toshiba laptop repairs”, “toshiba DVD repairs”, “toshiba TV repairs”, toshiba projector repairs”, etc.

In this case, including the exact matched [toshiba repair] is almost the same as using the broad matched version of the same keyword without having any negative keywords in place. Said differently, someone typing in “toshiba repair” exactly will not always be looking for the service you offer – Toshiba photocopier repairs.

So including the exact match [repair toshiba] as a default strategy will cause you to inadvertently get traffic for people searching for Toshiba repairs, who are not looking for Toshiba photocopier repair services as described above. And since you’re using an exact matched keyword, you have no way to filter out unwanted traffic from it short of simply not using it.

Why is this important? Two words: Quality Score

Even if you’re not wasting money from people clicking on your ads that are not looking for your service, your click through rate (CTR) will likely be very low and over time you might notice that your quality score is dropping on these keywords. This will create a spill-over effect where your minimum bid prices will rise as your quality score decreases. Google is sending you a message that you are not relevant enough and will now have to pay more to have your ads displayed on your exact matched keyword – a keyword that just by match type you might have thought was targeted!

So be sure to go over your existing exact matched keywords to make sure you aren’t targeting people who aren’t interested in your services. You’ll be able to spot some of these by a lower than average CTR especially where there is a high number of impressions.