Keywords Type in AdWords: The Complete Guide to Match Types That Actually Work

TL;DR: Google Ads uses four keyword match types—broad, phrase, exact, and negative—to control which searches trigger your ads. Broad match casts the widest net (including synonyms and related searches), phrase match triggers when your keyword's meaning is present, exact match offers the most precision (but still allows close variants), and negative keywords prevent your ads from showing on irrelevant searches. Understanding how these work in practice—not just in theory—is the difference between campaigns that scale profitably and ones that hemorrhage budget on junk traffic.

Here's the thing most advertisers get wrong: they set their match types once during campaign setup, then never look at them again. Meanwhile, their Search Terms Report fills up with irrelevant queries draining thousands of dollars. Sound familiar?

Whether you're managing a single account or juggling campaigns for fifty clients, mastering keyword match types isn't optional—it's the foundation of every profitable Google Ads campaign. Let's break down how these match types actually behave in 2026, and more importantly, how to use them strategically.

The Four Match Types and How They Actually Behave

Google's match types have evolved significantly since the early days of AdWords. If you learned about match types five years ago, some of what you know is outdated. Here's how each one works today.

Broad Match: Maximum Reach, Maximum Risk

Broad match is the default setting when you add a keyword without any special syntax. It gives Google the most freedom to interpret your keyword and show your ads on related searches, synonyms, and queries that share intent with your keyword—even if they don't contain your exact words.

Let's say you're bidding on the broad match keyword "running shoes." Your ads could trigger on searches like "athletic footwear," "jogging sneakers," "marathon training shoes," or even "best shoes for exercise." Google's algorithm looks at the searcher's context, location, recent search history, and landing page content to decide if your ad is relevant.

The upside? You discover search queries you never would have thought to target. Many advertisers find their best-performing keywords started as broad match discoveries. The downside? Without proper guardrails—Smart Bidding with sufficient conversion data and aggressive negative keyword lists—broad match can burn through budget faster than you can say "search terms report."

Phrase Match: The Middle Ground That Got Smarter

Phrase match used to mean your keyword had to appear in the exact order within the search query. Not anymore. Since Google's 2021 update, phrase match now triggers when the meaning of your keyword is present in the search, even if the word order changes or additional words appear.

Using our "running shoes" example as a phrase match keyword (formatted as "running shoes" in quotes), your ads could show for "best running shoes for beginners," "running shoes near me," or even "shoes for running marathons." Notice that last one? The word order flipped, but Google understands the intent matches your keyword.

What phrase match won't trigger on: searches that change the fundamental meaning. So "shoe stores with running track" or "running a shoe business" wouldn't qualify, because the intent has shifted away from purchasing running footwear.

This makes phrase match the sweet spot for most campaigns—more controlled than broad, more flexible than exact. Understanding Google Ads match types at this level helps you make smarter bidding decisions.

Exact Match: Precise, But Not As Exact As You Think

Exact match keywords use brackets: [running shoes]. In theory, this should mean your ads only show when someone searches for exactly those words in that order. In practice, Google still allows close variants.

Your exact match keyword will trigger on searches with the same intent, including misspellings ("runing shoes"), singular/plural variations ("running shoe"), abbreviations, and reordered words that don't change meaning. So [running shoes] could still match "shoes for running" or "running shoe."

What exact match filters out: related topics and synonyms. Unlike broad or phrase match, [running shoes] won't trigger on "jogging sneakers" or "athletic footwear"—only searches that clearly indicate the person is looking for running shoes specifically.

For high-value keywords where every click matters—think brand terms, high-converting product names, or expensive commercial intent phrases—exact match gives you the most control over exactly who sees your ads.

The Real-World Difference

Here's a practical comparison using "running shoes" across all three positive match types:

Broad match (running shoes): Could trigger on "athletic footwear brands," "best sneakers for jogging," "marathon training gear," "comfortable walking shoes"

Phrase match ("running shoes"): Triggers on "best running shoes 2026," "running shoes for flat feet," "cheap running shoes online," but not "shoes for running a business"

Exact match ([running shoes]): Triggers on "running shoes," "running shoe," "shoes running," "runing shoes" (misspelling), but not "trail running shoes" or "jogging sneakers"

Understanding these distinctions isn't academic—it directly impacts your cost per acquisition and whether your campaigns scale profitably or spiral into budget-draining chaos.

When to Use Each Match Type (Strategic Framework)

Knowing how match types work is one thing. Knowing when to deploy each one strategically is what separates profitable campaigns from expensive learning experiences.

Broad Match: For Discovery and Scale (With Guardrails)

Let's be clear: broad match isn't the villain it used to be, but it's not for everyone. It works best when you have three things in place: Smart Bidding (Target CPA, Target ROAS, or Maximize Conversions), at least 30-50 conversions per month for the algorithm to learn from, and aggressive negative keyword management.

Think of broad match as your exploration tool. Use it when you're entering a new market, launching a product with uncertain search demand, or looking to scale beyond your current keyword universe. The algorithm needs room to find patterns you haven't considered.

Where broad match fails: Limited budgets without conversion tracking. If you're spending $500/month and don't have conversion data, broad match will eat your budget testing irrelevant queries before you can react. Start with phrase or exact match instead.

Phrase Match: The Default Starting Point

For most campaigns, phrase match is your best friend. It gives you meaningful reach without the wild west chaos of broad match. You'll capture variations and long-tail searches while maintaining reasonable control over relevance.

Phrase match works especially well when you have a clear understanding of your product or service but want to capture different ways people search for it. Learning how to research long tail keywords for Google Ads can help you identify the variations worth targeting.

Many agencies default to phrase match for new client campaigns specifically because it generates enough data to make informed decisions without the risk of broad match going rogue before the first optimization review.

Exact Match: For High-Stakes Keywords

Reserve exact match for keywords where precision matters more than volume. This includes brand terms (you don't want your branded ad spend wasted on tangentially related searches), high-converting product names you've identified through testing, and expensive commercial intent keywords where every irrelevant click hurts.

Exact match also makes sense when you're working with limited budgets and can't afford to waste impressions. If you have $300/month to spend and you know exactly which five keywords drive conversions, lock them down with exact match and focus your spend there.

Layering Match Types: The Advanced Play

Here's a strategy many experienced advertisers use: layer multiple match types within the same campaign structure, but in separate ad groups with different bids.

Start with exact match at your target CPA or ROAS. Add phrase match at a slightly more conservative bid (maybe 20% lower). If you're testing broad match, put it in its own ad group at an even more conservative bid. This way, you control which match type gets priority when multiple keywords could trigger the same search.

As you gather data from your Search Terms Report, promote winning queries from phrase match to exact match with higher bids. Simultaneously, add losing queries as negatives. This creates a self-optimizing system where your most profitable keywords get the most aggressive bids, while you continue discovering new opportunities at lower risk. This approach is central to match type optimization strategy.

Negative Keywords: The Match Type Most People Ignore

If positive match types control what you bid on, negative keywords control what you refuse to bid on. And here's what's wild: most advertisers completely neglect this side of the equation, then wonder why their campaigns bleed money.

How Negative Keywords Work Differently

Negative keywords use the same match type syntax as positive keywords, but they behave differently in one critical way: negative exact match actually means exact. Unlike positive exact match (which allows close variants), a negative exact match keyword only blocks that specific term.

Let's say you sell premium running shoes and want to block "cheap." If you add "cheap running shoes" as a negative phrase match, you'll block searches that contain that phrase like "cheap running shoes online" or "where to buy cheap running shoes." But if you use negative exact match [cheap running shoes], you'll only block that exact query—"best cheap running shoes" would still trigger your ads. Understanding how match types work for negative keywords is crucial for effective budget protection.

Most of the time, negative phrase match is your best bet. It blocks a term and its variations without being overly restrictive.

Building Negative Keyword Lists from Search Terms Reports

Your Search Terms Report is a goldmine—or a minefield, depending on how you look at it. This report shows you the actual queries that triggered your ads, and it's where you'll find both your best opportunities and your biggest waste.

Set a weekly recurring task to review this report. Look for patterns in irrelevant searches. If you're seeing variations of "free," "DIY," "jobs," or "how to become" (when you're selling products, not courses), those are prime candidates for negative keywords.

Don't just add them one by one—think in themes. If "free running shoes" is showing up, you probably want to block "free" as a negative phrase match across the campaign. If you're getting job-related searches, add "jobs," "career," "hiring," and "salary" as negatives. Building a comprehensive negative keywords list for Google Ads takes time but pays dividends.

Where to Apply Negative Keywords

Google Ads gives you three levels for negative keywords, and knowing when to use each one matters:

Account-level negative lists: Create lists of universally irrelevant terms (like "free," "jobs," "DIY" if you're an e-commerce brand) and apply them across all campaigns. This prevents the same junk searches from appearing in every new campaign you launch.

Campaign-level negatives: Use these for terms that are irrelevant to a specific campaign but might be relevant elsewhere. For example, if you have separate campaigns for men's and women's running shoes, add "women's" as a campaign-level negative to the men's campaign and vice versa.

Ad group-level negatives: These are for very specific exclusions within a tightly themed ad group. You'll use these less frequently, but they're helpful when you have multiple ad groups targeting closely related keywords and need to prevent overlap.

The goal isn't to block every remotely irrelevant search—you'll never get there, and you might accidentally block good traffic. The goal is to systematically eliminate the patterns of waste that show up repeatedly in your Search Terms Report. Knowing how to add negative keywords in Google Ads efficiently makes this process manageable.

Common Match Type Mistakes That Drain Budgets

Let's talk about the mistakes that cost advertisers real money. These aren't theoretical—they're patterns you'll see in almost every underperforming account.

Running Broad Match Without Smart Bidding

This is the big one. Advertisers hear that broad match has improved and decide to test it, but they're still using Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks bidding. Without Smart Bidding's conversion-based optimization, broad match has no feedback loop to learn what "relevant" means for your business.

The result? Your ads show on everything remotely related to your keyword, regardless of whether those searches convert. You burn through budget in days, panic, and conclude broad match doesn't work—when really, you just didn't set it up correctly.

If you want to test broad match, you need Target CPA, Target ROAS, or Maximize Conversions with a target. Period. And you need enough conversion volume for the algorithm to learn. Without those pieces, stick to phrase and exact match.

Assuming Exact Match Means 'Only This Exact Phrase'

Advertisers coming from older PPC training often believe exact match gives them complete control over exactly which searches trigger their ads. Then they're shocked to see their [running shoes] keyword triggering on "running shoe" or "shoes for running."

This isn't a bug—it's how exact match works now. Google considers close variants (plurals, misspellings, function words, reordered words with the same intent) as part of exact match. If you want truly restrictive targeting, you need exact match combined with aggressive negative keywords.

The lesson: Don't assume your match types are working the way they did five years ago. Check your Search Terms Report regularly to see what's actually triggering your ads.

Neglecting the Search Terms Report

This might be the most expensive mistake of all. Advertisers set up their campaigns, choose their match types, and then... never look at what's actually happening.

Your Search Terms Report is the only place you can see the reality of your keyword targeting. It shows you where Google's algorithm is taking your broad and phrase match keywords. It reveals the close variants triggering your exact match keywords. It exposes the budget-draining searches you should have blocked weeks ago.

If you're not reviewing this report at least weekly—daily for high-spend accounts—you're flying blind. Set a calendar reminder. Make it non-negotiable. The patterns you'll find in this report are worth more than any keyword research tool. Learning how to find negative keywords from this data is a skill every advertiser needs.

Creating Keyword Overlap Without Bid Adjustments

Here's a subtle one: having the same keyword in multiple match types without considering which one should win when they compete. If you have "running shoes" as broad match, phrase match, and exact match all in the same ad group with the same bid, Google decides which one triggers based on Ad Rank—and that might not align with your strategy.

Better approach: If you're layering match types, put them in separate ad groups with different bids. Give exact match the highest bid (since it's most precise), phrase match a moderate bid, and broad match the lowest bid. This creates a clear hierarchy and ensures your most controlled keywords get priority.

Putting Match Types to Work: A Practical Setup Approach

Theory is great, but you need a practical system for actually implementing this stuff. Here's a workflow that scales whether you're managing one campaign or a hundred.

Start with Phrase Match for New Campaigns

When launching a new campaign or testing a new product, default to phrase match. It gives you the discovery benefits of broader targeting without the risk of broad match going off the rails before you can review performance.

Build out a core list of 10-20 phrase match keywords that represent different angles of how people might search for your product or service. Don't overthink it—you're gathering data, not trying to predict every possible search query. The Search Terms Report will show you what you missed. If you need guidance on choosing keywords for AdWords, start with your best-converting terms.

Run this for at least two weeks (longer if you have low traffic) before making major changes. You need enough data to identify patterns—both winning searches to promote and losing searches to block.

Mine Your Search Terms Report Like Gold

After you've gathered initial data, dive into your Search Terms Report with a clear mission: find winners to promote to exact match and losers to add as negatives.

Look for search queries that have strong conversion rates or high conversion value. These are your promotion candidates. Add them as exact match keywords in a separate ad group with higher bids. This ensures you're aggressively bidding on searches you know convert.

Simultaneously, identify search queries with high impressions or clicks but zero conversions (or conversions at unprofitable CPAs). Add these as negative keywords at the appropriate level—campaign-wide if they're universally irrelevant, ad group-specific if they only conflict with certain keywords.

This isn't a one-time task. It's an ongoing optimization loop. The best-managed accounts do this weekly, sometimes daily for high-spend campaigns.

Use Tools That Work Inside Google Ads

Here's where workflow efficiency becomes critical, especially if you're managing multiple accounts. The traditional approach—exporting Search Terms Reports to spreadsheets, sorting data, manually adding negatives, manually creating new keywords—eats hours of your week.

Modern optimization happens faster when you can take action directly within Google Ads. Instead of switching between tabs and spreadsheets, you can review a search term and immediately decide: remove it as junk, add it as a negative, promote it to a new keyword group, or apply a specific match type—all with a few clicks.

This isn't just about saving time (though that matters). It's about reducing the friction between insight and action. When optimization is tedious, you do it less often. When it's seamless, you do it more consistently—and consistency is what separates good accounts from great ones. Effective Google AdWords optimization depends on this regular attention.

Test Broad Match Only After You Have the Foundation

Once you have a solid negative keyword list, proven exact match winners, and Smart Bidding with conversion data, then consider testing broad match. Start with a small budget allocation—maybe 20% of your campaign budget in a separate ad group.

Monitor it closely for the first week. Check your Search Terms Report daily to see what Google is testing. Be ready to add negatives aggressively. If you're seeing irrelevant searches, don't wait—block them immediately.

If broad match discovers profitable searches you hadn't considered, great—promote those to phrase or exact match and keep testing. If it's just burning money on tangentially related searches, pause it and stick with phrase and exact match. Not every account is ready for broad match, and that's okay.

The Bottom Line: Match Types Are Living, Breathing Campaign Elements

If there's one thing to take away from this guide, it's this: keyword match types aren't a set-it-and-forget-it decision you make during campaign setup. They're living elements of your campaigns that require ongoing attention, optimization, and strategic adjustment based on actual performance data.

The advertisers who consistently run profitable campaigns understand that their Search Terms Report is more valuable than any keyword research tool. It shows them exactly where their money is going, which match types are working, and where they need to tighten control with negatives or expand reach with broader targeting.

Start by auditing your current campaigns. What match types are you using? When was the last time you reviewed your Search Terms Report? Do you have negative keyword lists built from actual search data, or are you just hoping irrelevant searches don't find you?

The difference between a campaign that scales profitably and one that hemorrhages budget often comes down to these fundamentals. Master your match types, build systematic negative keyword lists, and create a regular optimization rhythm—that's the foundation everything else builds on.

And here's the reality: the faster you can optimize, the better your results. Every day you wait to add that negative keyword or promote that winning search term is a day you're either wasting money or missing opportunity.

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