Modified What Type?

Back in early 2008, Google changed its philosophy on broad match and introduced expanded broad match.  At the time, this had many advertisers upset, as Google’s expanded broad match had many disadvantages to an advertiser looking for quality traffic from their broad match keywords.  Google insisted that its expanded broad match was to give more traffic to advertisers.  Expanded broad match led to many broad keywords mapping to very irrelevant keywords.  Many advertisers began using broad match as a way to increase their negatives.  For example, if your broad keyword was formal footwear, Google would map your keyword to women’s evening footwear, and men’s dress wingtips.

Google recently introduced a new match type called modified broad match.  This new match type gives an advertiser more control over their broad match and with similar high quality targeting than phrase match offers.  Google’s new modified broad match allows you to put a “+” sign in front of your broad keyword.  This can be considered an anchor of sorts for your keywords.  If you now put a + sign in front of your broad keyword formal shoes (+formal +shoes), Google will now map your keyword to close variants of these two words.  These variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, synonyms and closely related variants to those keywords.  Now +formal +shoes can map to frmal shoes, or even formal evening shoes.  Modified broad match makes sure that your keywords are the main keywords in the user’s search query.

According to Google, the new match type should not be a 100% replacement for any current broad match keywords, as you might lose some traffic, but used in the right situations this can be extremely effective.  For example, if you were using phrase match with geographic modifiers within your keywords, such as “orange county charter”, your ad would only appear when the search query contained those 3 keywords in that order.  If you were to use the modified broad match, your ad would now show for any order of those keywords, plus, it would also show for close variations and variations of those keywords along with other keywords a user would search for.  This means that these keywords are effective in picking up long tail traffic, and not wasting money on Google’s expanded broad match.