What’s the Best Match Type for Your Paid Search Campaign? [Our Experts Reveal New Testing Data]

Now that we’ve covered which match types exist, why are marketers consolidating? Alana Dritz, Paid Search Strategist at Tinuiti, breaks it down.

All Non-Brand Exact keywords were layered into historical Phrase campaigns on 10/14.

The Challenge:
Client X has a long history of advertising on Google Ads, with an account that has changed hands more than a few times over the years. As a result, they have an account with a robust data history but a fragmented account structure. It was loaded with artificial segmentations and redundancies that ultimately hindered the functionality of Google’s smart bidding technology.
Consolidation is the future.
Client Vertical: Subscription + Ecommerce | Platform: Google Ads
Not sure what a match type is? Let’s break them down.

What is a match type?

At Tinuiti, we have been seeing very strong success moving away from hyper-segmentation within campaigns. Conversions are up, CPA is down, CPCs are down, and relevancy has improved as we have given the system more leniency to go after relevant traffic. But we’ll let the results speak for themselves. Check out 3 of our masked clients who have experienced huge wins with match-type consolidation.
The Results:

Exact match for precision
Broad match for reach
Phrase match for a balance of both

The Solution:

The Results:

Why are marketers consolidating?

“With the clear success of smart bidding tactics and Google’s ever-evolving match type semantics, the need to parse out match types by campaign is no longer relevant. At the search auction, the focus has really shifted away from the exact search term searched, to who that customer is, how that customer has previously interacted and what the expected intent really is going to be. By consolidating match types, you’re feeding the algorithm improved signal information to maximize the understanding of what that user behavior is.”

What We Learned:

Currently, there are three main match type options to select from including:
Goal and Test Details:

Is match type consolidation working?

Google’s smart bidding technology has advanced leaps & bounds in recent history, which has turned a lot of best practices upside down. Google removed support for modified broad match, moving to phrase & performance broad while changes to exact match types also occurred; moving away from showing results for just a keyword to now including the same meanings of the keyword.

Tinuiti’s match type consolidation case studies

SEM Campaign Consolidation

Smart Bidding capabilities have evolved in recent years, resulting in stark changes to account structure best practices
The Challenge: The Challenge:
Testing Timing (Oct-Dec 2021)

Consolidate traffic into fewer and larger ad groups and campaigns.
Consolidate match types into the same ad group.
Utilize Exact & Performance Broad keyword match types.
Avoid creating duplicate keywords in Phrase match.
Maximize coverage and incremental reach with Dynamic Search Ads (DSA).
Leverage Responsive Search Ads (RSA) and dynamic features for Creatives.

To test Google’s new best practice of combining match types into one campaign in order to cut down on account management by moving away from hyper-segmentation and letting the engine match based on user intent.
To test Google’s new best practice of combining match types into one campaign in order to cut down on account management by moving away from hyper-segmentation and letting the engine match based on user intent.