The value of exact matches in Google Ads

Although Exact Match is no longer worthy of the name when applied to a keyword, there are several ways in which exact matches between keyword and search term seriously matter to the way Google Ads works for you.

1) Keeping Search Terms Under Control

Where you have an eligible keyword that is deemed identical to the search term, that keyword must be used to match the search term, above any keyword that doesn’t.

What does that mean for us? In a world of exasperating spillover and crossover between search terms and keywords, having a keyword that exactly matches the search term in question, pulls that search term into its rightful place, rather than allowing it to roam wild.

Where you have instances of the same keyword on different match types, any query that exactly matches that keyword will trigger the instance of the keyword on the more refined match type, regardless of Ad Rank (a welcome change that arrived in 2021).

These rules taken together give us an excellent framework for an account in which we know – to a decent degree – which searches are triggering which keywords (and therefore ads) – without resorting to the extensive ‘internal negatives’ that used to overcomplicate so many accounts.

To take advantage of those rules – we just need to make sure we have keywords to exactly match the search terms we care about.

Note that misspellings are considered identical whereas singular plural variations are NOT.

So while most of us don’t usually bother with singular plural variation on the grounds that singular keywords can very easily pick up the plural variation – or vice versa – yes they can – but they are not bound to.

The other variation of the search term can migrate to another, less relevant keyword instead – and often does.

2) Prioritising Search

Where a query exactly matches an eligible keyword in your search campaigns, the search campaign will take precedence for the auction over your Performance Max or DSA campaigns.

That is not the case where the query does not exactly match a keyword.

Not only do we usually want to keep our core search terms in the search sphere for better performance…

from The hidden impact of Performance Max on your Search impression share data - Adalysis

…better visibility and better manageability – it also helps preserve the integrity of impression share metrics.

Last week, Adalysis published a valuable piece on the ways in which PMax can skew the impression share data of your search campaigns. In short, when both are eligible but your PMax  campaign enters the auction ahead of Search – the resulting impression does not count towards the total, potential impressions of the search campaign.

It’s not just the impressions that’s lost from your search campiagns, it’s visibility into the ‘potential impression’, for the purposes of Impression Share calculations. (You could even find your search IS misleadingly rising as the ‘size of the pie’ shrinks, even as your impression count remains the same).

The PMax impression share metrics towards which that impression does count, are also less granular, being available only at the campaign rather than the keyword level.

It’s a more technical point – but yet another reason why it is worth protecting our key impressions from being snaffled by PMax, by having those ‘exactly matching’ keywords (and specifically, having those keywords on Exact match, to make sure they trump PMax search themes).

3) Exact Matches and Quality Score

Quality score is only calculated on the basis of queries that exactly match the keyword. (It’s worth remembering this, as it means that improving a keyword’s CTR by adding negatives for some of its less relevant search terms, for example, has no Quality Score impact.)

So if you want to see – and influence – your Quality Score as it relates to any given search, you’ll need a keyword that exactly matches that search.

These days we generally don’t try to cover off every search term that has any value, with matching keywords.

It would be impractical to try.

But it is worth matching – precisely – all of the search terms that we really care about, because there are some real differences in how Google deals with queries that exactly match your keywords… and they’re almost all to our advantage.

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