August 13, 2009 by James Oliver
Google recently issued a statement clarifying their position when it comes to match types for keywords and in doing so managed to settle a debate that had been going on amongst PPC account managers for some time. You see, some managers (not any of us, you understand) had contended that multiple match types of the same keyword were a good thing to do for quality score, reasoning that if Google rewards relevancy, then surely phrase and exact match keywords would be rewarded more.
This resulted in people cluttering up accounts by including each of their broad match keywords twice more, in ‘phrase’ and ‘exact match’ form, so as to chase better quality score.
Unfortunately, it turns out that they needn’t have bothered as Google clarified recently – incidentally vindicating our position on the issue, not that we’re smug about it – quality score has nothing to do with match type. I’ll let Google explain it in their own words…
“Google maintains two types of Quality Scores: one that is used to compute your minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids and another that is used to determine your ad position. Neither is directly impacted by match type.”
So, there you have it. We can finally put that one to bed. The only time differing match types should be used is when you actually want to target with varying levels of specificity.
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