AdWords Expanded Broad Match: How to Combat Google’s Cash Grab
November 5th, 2007
Switch to Phrase and Exact Match and Bring Down Your Cost Per Click and Cost Per Sale
Yesterday, I got an email from my acquaintance Andrew Goodman over at PageZero (author of the excellent 
Winning Results with Google AdWords) discussing issues with broad match in Google PPC management.
In August one of my clients had a horrible surprise (well we both did) where PPC costs skyrocketed - almost tripling for one week, with only about a 25% improvement in leads.
I got on it right away and called Google. The Google AdWords representative told me that thanks to our great quality score we'd qualified for "expanded broad match". Although Google says that they are against get rich quick schemes and fake sweepstakes in AdWords, this move is straight out of that shady playbook.
Sure, we'd "qualified". Qualified to pay three times as much for just a fraction more business.
"So how do we turn it off?" I asked.
"You can't," she answered.
So what did I do? My clients had been making money on this campaign and they wanted to go back to doing so. So I eliminated all broad match phrases from all our campaigns. That left some holes in the campaigns so I added some additional phrase matches to compensate, i.e.
broad match:
French DVD films
became phrase match:
"French DVD films"
"DVD French films"
"films French DVD"
"DVD films French"
"French films DVD"
As you can see it takes six phrase matches to cover a single three word broad match. With longer phrases, there are clearly phrases which are more likely than others so it's not all that intimidating.
A bit of a pain in the neck, but eminently doable (Splutweb's keyword permutation tool is free and speeds the process).
The result was worth it. Our advertising costs dropped in half (about one quarter or one fifth of what Google was serving us with expanded broad match).
With expanded broad match our CTR went way down. So not only were we getting lots more lousy clicks, we were now paying far more per click. When that CTR went down, advertising costs soared.
How about the sales? Well, they are down about 20% from what we had pre-expanded broad match. They are down about a third from what we had with expanded broad match.
Here's what those numbers might look like with and without expanded broad match.
| Match Type | Cost | Sales | CPS (cost per sale) |
|---|---|---|---|
| original Broad Match | $4600 | 480 | $9.58 |
| with Expanded Broad Match | $8400 | 600 | $14.00 |
| Phrase/Exact Match only | $3500 | 680 | $5.47 |
So in the end, Google did us a favour by penalising us for one week with expanded broad match. They weaned us off of broad match altogether.
If you want to make money with AdWords, just don't use broad match.
The two interesting forms are phrase match which is created by putting quotation marks around your phrase "french DVD films" or exact match which is created by putting square brackets on your term [french DVD films].
Anything other kind of match and you are taking money out of your children's education fund and subsidising Google's purchase of YouTube.
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