Expanded broad match?

Switched to exact match without knowing it !

[vanderbolt]

I just realized that while my campaign was set to expanded broad match, it has been switched somehow to exact match.

This I found by searching for kw "widget" and clicking on the word "widget". Has anyone else experienced the same thing? How can something like this happen without advertiser's knowledge?

[AdWordsAdvisor]

vanderbolt, not sure I caught the whole story here.

However, you can confirm (and change, if desired) the targeting of your keyword. Just go to the Ad Group in question and see if the keyword has [square brackets] around it where it appears in your keyword list.

* If [it does], then it is an exact match

* If it has "quote marks" around it, it is a phrase match

* If it has nothing at all around it, it is a broad match

AWA

[davewray]

What would you recommend? An exact match, phrase match or broad match? I would suspect that a broad match would serve you tons of impressions, but a lower CTR. However an exact match may get you a higher CTR, but there may be far fewer impressions. What do you all recommend?

Dave.

[colinirwin]

Initially, run all 3 alongside each other.

Then monitor the actual search phrases people use to reach your site by analysing logs / client side analytics results. Use these to add any new relevant phrases as both phrase and exact match. Also look for unwanted keywords in these phrases and insert them in your ad group with a - before them. After a while you should have identified a lot of useful longer phrases that broad match has unearthed and you can kill the broad match phrases.

Howver, if you use ROI tracking you can determine whether the broad match phrases give you an unacceptably low conversion cost before killing them.

Col