broad match - exact match - which CTR?

something that confused me a little

[briggidere]

We went to the ses conference last week and went to one of the sessions on broad matching techniques.

Barney jones from Google UK was there talking about how google does their broad match.

It seems that the CTR on broad match does not really mean that.

lets say you have wigets on broad match.
google calculates you ranking score by max CPC x CTR

a user searches for small wigets, which in turn triggers your wigets broad match ad.

behind the scenes google is calculating your CTR not on your broad match CTR, but on the Exact match of that searched phrase within your broad match campaign.

so it seems even though that you are doing broad match, you are actually creating an exact match ctr within that campaign.

Has anyone else heard about this, or is this old news to most?

Briggidere

[elsewhen]

i havent heard about this... if it is true, then there seem to be only two primary reasons why advertisers would use exact or phrase match:

1) the advertiser wants to RESTRICT or tightly control the showing of ads - and therefore uses no broadmatches at all

2) the advertiser wants to track which keywords are triggering the ads.

the main reason i use exact and phrase matches is because i thought it would improve CTR for those keywords/keyphrases and then i would get better ad positioning in those cases.

if what you say is correct, and the "hidden keyword match" behind the broadmatch is recorded and tracked by google, then one of the primary reasons to use exact/phrase matches is out the window.

would be very interested to get corroboration on this.

[mike_ppc]

it sounds very interesting. but are you sure this is accurate? i mean, anybody can express an opinion; was that an authorised opinion?

[DavidDeprice]

I find it that the old "Can I buy it?" technique works very well, especially with search. You can apply it to content as well, meaning you have to design your ad copy that way. For istance, "home appliances". Can you buy "appliances"? No you can't. You go to store and ask them to sell you "appliances" and they'll say "what exactly do you want". But if you say "I want a front load washing machine", they'll be able to sell it to you, after you narrow it down to a brand and a particular model. So instead of bidding on "software", I bid on particular software types, like "Internet monitoring software", "server backup", "Adobe Photoshop Plug-ins" and write an ad for each category. That's the only way that I can make it profitable. The broad much is negative ROI for me.