When you use broad match, your ad is eligible to serve when someone searches for relevant variations of your keyword. This helps you attract more visitors to your website, spend less time building keyword lists, and focus your spending on keywords that work.
Broad match is the default match type that all your keywords are assigned if you don't specify exact match or phrase match. Broad match keywords match relevant variations of your keywords, including synonyms, possible misspellings, stemmings (such as floor and flooring), related searches, and other relevant variations. To help deliver relevant matches, this match type may also take the customer's recent search activities into account.
Example
| Broad match keyword: | Ads may show on searches for: |
| low-carb diet plan |
carb-free foods low-carb diets low calorie recipes Mediterranean diet plans low-carbohydrate dietary program |
Note
Microsoft Advertising does not support broad match for negative keywords. Learn more About negative keywords.
How broad match can help you
You can set any or all of your search-targeted keywords to broad match to help you do the following:
- Spend less time building keyword lists: You don't have to think of every possible keyword variation. Every day a large portion of new searches are unique, and this unpredictable search behavior can make it nearly impossible for you to create a keyword list using only exact match that covers all possible relevant searches.
- Spend your money on keywords that work: If your ad receives no clicks on a particular keyword variation, our system will quickly stop showing your ads for that and similar search terms. This prevents you from accruing click charges for keyword variations that aren't working and helps you focus on the keywords that work.
When other options might be more helpful
- You want to serve on searches that are closely related to the products you’re selling. For example, consider the one-word keyword "hose" (and one-word keywords are almost always too general). You may sell garden hoses, but your keyword will also be relevant to search terms for automotive hoses, hosiery, fire hoses, and more.
- You'll generally achieve a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) with exact and phrase match because your ads include the exact terms your customers are searching on.
Use broad match modifier for more control over broad match
Adding modified broad match keywords can increase campaign clicks and conversions, while providing more precise control than broad match. Modified broad match lets you specify that certain broad match keyword terms, or their close variants, must appear to trigger your ad. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (such as floor and flooring). Learn more About broad match modifiers.
- Try using a combination of two or more keyword match types to run an effective ad campaign. If you use broad and phrase match, for example, you'll reach a broader audience while also controlling who can see your ad.
- If you want to make sure your ads don't show for a certain search term, add that term to your ad group or campaign as a negative keyword.
- Pausing or removing a keyword won't stop one of your active broad-matched keywords from "expanding" to that term. For example, if your ad group contains the broad-matched keywords flowers and tulips, and you pause the keyword tulips, your ads could still potentially show for the search term tulips, since it's similar to the active broad-matched keyword flowers.