Best Practices Guide: Reaching the right customers on Search

Group your campaigns by your bidding objective, then choose your keyword match types.

Why: Your bidding objective will determine which keyword match types are most suitable for you. If you can accurately measure your conversions and use a conversion-based Smart Bidding strategy like Maximise conversions with a target CPA or Maximise conversion value with a target ROAS, broad match provides the greatest reach and conversions within your goals. In fact, 62% of advertisers using Smart Bidding use broad match as their primary match type.1 If you have other bidding goals, like Target impression share, you may want to consider using phrase match or exact match.

Implement value-based bid strategies to increase performance..

Why: You can optimise the true business impact of your advertising campaigns more accurately by measuring the value of conversions that are important to you (eg. lifetime value, revenue or profit), and not just the volume of these conversions. This enables Smart Bidding to maximise your conversion value and reach your target ROAS. On average, advertisers that switch their bid strategy from having a target CPA to a target ROAS can see 14% more conversion value at a similar return on ad spend.

Use broad match with Smart Bidding to reach more relevant searches for your business that are expected to perform within your goals.

Why: Broad match is the only match type that uses all of the signals available in Google Ads to understand the intent of both the user’s search and your keyword, while having the flexibility to find the most relevant match that is expected to perform for you. Smart Bidding ensures that, for all of the relevant searches you could reach with broad match, you’re only competing in the right auctions, at the right bid, for the right user.

Easily test broad match keywords from your Recommendations page.

Why: Run a test to see if broad match improves the performance of your campaigns. If you’re using Smart Bidding, we’ll identify existing keywords that are likely to improve performance if you add them as broad match, and automatically surface these opportunities to you on the Recommendations page in your account. You can also test the performance of these broad match keywords by creating a one-click experiment directly in the recommendation.

Use responsive search ads with broad match and Smart Bidding to show up for more people and adapt to shifts in consumer behaviour.

Why: This combination helps you reach the right customers, with the right message, at the right price, no matter how they’re searching. Broad match reaches all searches that exact and phrase match can reach—plus more. Responsive search ads automatically create relevant ads for each of those searches. And Smart Bidding customises bids for each and every query—not just every keyword.

Use Smart Bidding with broad match-only campaigns to help simplify your accounts.

Why: Smart Bidding works best when it can optimise against your goals with as much flexibility as possible. And because the Google Ads bidding algorithms learn at the query level rather than the keyword level, if a search query has already been matching to keywords in other parts of your campaigns, we simply apply what we’ve learned across your account. This means you can simplify your accounts by using broad match for performance-based keywords.

Group your keywords into ad groups and campaigns with similar themes.

Why: This makes it easier for Google to understand your keywords, select the best one, and determine which ad should serve for each search query.

To learn more about these best practices, check out this deep dive into AI-powered Search ads.

Article footnotes:

1. Based on clicks and advertisers with >100 clicks. Google Internal Data, Global, January - February 2023

2. Google Internal Data, Global, Feb 2023

3. Google internal data, Global, 2022-03-28 to 2022-04-19