I have the word 'widgets' broad matched but have seen the prices sky rocket in the last few weeks. This is due (I think) to other competitors exact matching on the word 'widgets' (they do not appear on other variations of that word such as blue widgets, red widgets etc). So my overall CTR on the word 'widgets' is say 1% where theirs will be about 5% (i.e. I have to pay 5 times more to get above them as my ads show across many more words which reduces my CTR).
My idea is to have the word widgets both exact matched and broad matched within my adgroup. I can then set the price on the exact match but still enjoy the extra traffic on the broad match option.
Has anyone ever tried this with any success?
this is the way that a lot of people use adwords to maximise their account.
we use all of the matching options, broad, phrase and exact all with different bids.
usually we'll bid more for the exact match as it is more relevant to the users search therefore more likely to convert. this does not necessarily mean we pay more for the click, just that we are prepared to pay a bit more for it.
At least in our neck of the woods, broad/phrase/exact all convert differently. In addition, part of our goal is to peel off any productive broad match searches into their own exact and phrase matches, where they can be profitably bid higher. Broad matching should ultimately be just for really oddball mis-spellings.
I would be somewhat surprised though if the quality score of a keyword is based on the match type though. In other words, Google should already be quantifying at least three different quality scores per broad match keyword. No idea if they are, but they *should* be.
That said, I don't think splitting individual keywords up into broad, phrase and exact variants is the norm. We've worked with at two different PPC consulting groups who seemed to think our practice was idiosyncratic and unnecessary.
