Broad match type keywords trigger ads whenever someone searches for:

All of those variations allow Google to show your ads to an enormous pool of search queries. 

It's unlikely that all of the search queries triggering your broad keywords are relevant to your business, let alone the specific ads you show. You'll most likely end up with a lot of low-quality leads.

Of course, this match type isn't pure evil — it exists for a reason, and you'll want to use it occasionally. It's especially useful when you are looking to expand your audience and find new keywords. 

So, how can you limit the amount you spend on broad keywords? We suggest that you change your broad keywords to phrase-match keywords.

You’ll see this improvement if we’ve found a broad keyword sending you irrelevant traffic. We'll recommend you change the keyword to phrase match, showing your ads to a more focused audience.

To identify a suitable keyword, we make the following checks:

Campaign type

We only consider active search campaigns in the account. We intentionally skip brand campaigns, audience-focused ad groups, and dynamic ad groupings. This is because specific targeting already places restrictions on broad-match keywords.

Keyword selection

When selecting a suitable keyword, our goal is to analyse the most recent and relevant data. The default date range is 30 days, but we may extend this up to 180 days if the data does not meet our minimum clicks threshold.

The keywords we are interested in match the following criteria:

Keyword performance

To decide if a broad match keyword would benefit from switching to phrase match, we analyse its performance against the campaign group average.

Keywords that significantly underperform, with a CPA 3x worse than the campaign group average (or 4x worse in ROAS mode), are flagged for closer examination.

Once a keyword is flagged, we then look to see how much it has spent, and how many search terms it has generated.

Among the flagged keywords, we prioritise those that generate a minimum of 10 search terms and come with a higher cost. These keywords become prime candidates for replacement with phrase-match keywords.

That’s when the improvement will appear in your account, and once you hit apply*,* Opteo will pause the broad keyword and replace it with a phrase match keyword in the same ad group.

To help you decide whether to apply or dismiss this improvement, we will show you the search queries that triggered the identified broad keyword. This way you can gauge the relevancy of the traffic.