What Match Types Should You Start with in a New PPC Account?

What’s your language?

Broad match is often ‘too broad’ for many people. We see totally irrelevant queries show for broad match. It’s a nice match type to use when you want to see all the query volume possible; however, it’s often an underperforming match type – in English.

But outside of Latin based languages, broad match is very useful. For instance, in this account, we see search queries across languages:

No match type outside of broad can match across languages. If you are advertising in countries where there are many multi-lingual queries, then it can be useful to use some broad match as its very broad in English, but not nearly so in other languages.

What’s your geographic size?

If you are advertising to a country or multiple countries, then there’s often sufficient search volume to get impressions using exact and phrase match. However, if you are advertising to a very small geography, such as a single city, then sometimes your keywords will be marked as ‘low search volume’ and won’t show until they receive at least 30 impressions a month.

In these cases, you need to use broader match types to have your ads consistently show.

The smaller your geography, the more the need you’ll have to use broader match types.

How large is the search volume in your industry?

If you are in a very niche industry that does not have a lot of search volume, you once again need to use some modified broad or broad match just to have your ads displayed.

If you are in an industry that has a tremendous amount of search volume, then you can start with more restrictive match types if you’d like to, but you’re not required to do so.

Overall Starting Match Types

When you’re first building an account, think about volume versus control.

If you want control, then you’ll want to start with a lot of exact match. Then consider the search volume and geography. If they are small, then you’ll have to move to at least modified broad match to make sure your ads are consistently displaying.  If the search volume and geographic size is large, then you can continue to build your account with exact and phrase match.

If you want a lot of impressions, then you can start with modified broad match as it offers a middle ground between impression and control. However, if your target market crosses languages or the account is not in English, then starting with broad match can be useful.

Before you build your account, consider:

• Budget
• Desire for control
• Geographic size
• Languages
• Overall search volume of your keywords

By examining these factors, it should be easy to pick a match type that will offer you what you need in your initial account build. Then once you start to receive data, you can start optimizing your match types, keyword expansion, and negative keywords based upon the story the data tells you.