Broad match is the loosest of the Google Ads keyword match types: it lets your ad appear for any search Google judges to be related in meaning to your keyword, whether or not the search contains your words. It is the default when you add a keyword without quotation marks or square brackets.
How broad match works
With exact match, the search has to mean the same as the keyword. With phrase match, it has to include the keyword’s meaning. Broad match goes further and asks whether the searcher could plausibly want what the keyword describes.
Take the broad keyword boiler service for a heating engineer in Bristol. It can match boiler service Bristol and annual gas boiler check, which are useful. It can also match boiler repair, Gas Safe register search or how often should a boiler be serviced, which may or may not be worth paying for. Google decides using more than the words: the other keywords in the ad group, the landing page, the ad text and, in some cases, what the person searched for just before.
This is why broad match behaves differently depending on how a campaign bids. With manual bidding, it matches widely with no way of telling which searches are likely to convert. With Smart Bidding, each auction is bid on separately using signals such as device, location and time of day, so weak matches can be bid down and promising ones bid up. Google designs broad match to be used with Smart Bidding, and in my view it rarely performs well without it.
Broad match no longer has a modified version. The old plus-sign format was retired in 2021 and its behaviour folded into phrase match.
Why it matters
Broad match finds searches you would never think to list. People describe the same need in many different ways, and plenty of searches each day are phrasings nobody has typed before. For a business with good conversion tracking and enough volume, broad match lets the bid strategy explore that long tail.
The risk is spend on searches that sound related but are not. A London wedding photographer’s broad keyword can drift into wedding photography courses or photographer jobs. Every one of those clicks costs the same as a real enquiry would.
Common mistakes
- Using broad match with manual CPC or Maximise clicks, so nothing filters the loose matches.
- Switching to broad match when conversion tracking is weak or records low-value actions as conversions. The bid strategy will chase whatever you tell it to value.
- Never reading the search terms report after launch.
- Running broad match on a very small budget, where a few irrelevant clicks use up the day.
How to act on it
Check your conversion tracking first: broad match is only as good as the conversions it learns from. If tracking is sound and the campaign uses a conversion-based bid strategy, test broad match in a campaign experiment against your existing phrase and exact setup, and judge it on cost per conversion over several weeks rather than on clicks.
Once it is live, review the search terms at least weekly at first and add negative keywords for anything off-topic. My free keyword match type tool formats a list into each match type so you can compare them. If you would rather have someone run the tests and the weekly search term reviews, that is the core of my Google search ads management.