Expanding Your Reach with Broad Match: Top 3 Best Practices

Broad match is one of the most flexible keyword match types in Google Ads, as it displays your ads to a wider reach by showing it for searches related to your keywords. However, to attract the right audience and avoid spending too much on unqualified clicks, there are certain best practices that need to be adhered to. Here are three strategies that can maximize the use of broad match and expand reach effectively.

1. Use Negative Keywords Wisely

Broad match keywords may make your ads appear on a wide range of search terms, including irrelevant ones. Using negative keywords in the right way can filter out terms that do not help you achieve your business goals and ensure that your budget is spent on qualified clicks.

For instance, assuming you operate an agency based in Gurgaon in the niche of digital marketing, when you are bidding on a broad match term like “digital marketing services,” then your ads will get served based on searches around “free digital marketing tools” and “digital marketing jobs.” The addition of negative keywords “free” and “jobs” eliminates irrelevant clicks and strengthens ad relevance.

Best Practices for Negative Keywords

Monitor the Search Terms Report: Scan this report regularly to find irrelevant keywords that are possibly causing your ads to show and add them as negatives.
Use Multiple Match Types: Use a combination of broad, phrase, and exact match negative keywords to ensure you get very specific control over which terms trigger your ads.

2. Leverage Broad Match with Smart Bidding

This will allow the Google algorithms to work toward optimizing either conversions or revenue based on real-time signals when paired with smart bidding strategies, such as Target CPA or Target ROAS. This allows for the best performance to happen for your campaign, with dynamic adjustments of bids to reach the right users at the right time.

For example, if your goal is to bring leads for your digital marketing agency in Gurgaon, Target CPA bidding would keep your cost-per-acquisition within a certain budget, automatically adjusting the bids. Google’s smart bidding will use signals like device, location, and search intent to increase the chances of hitting potential clients.

Tips for Broad Match and Smart Bidding:

Start with a Lower CPA Target: Ensure you obtain high-quality conversions within budget, starting with an attainable CPA target.
Smart Bidding Optimizes Best: Avoid too many interventions in the learning phase; otherwise, optimization may get derailed.
Track Performance: Use campaign performance as an anchor to adjust the target so that you can hone and perfect it over time.

3. Layer Audiences for Targeted Reach

Targeting audiences will help to further narrow reach even when using broad match keywords. In addition, it further refines the display by layering in-market audiences, affinity groups, or remarketing lists to target people who are more likely to engage with your business. This will improve ad relevance and campaign performance.

For instance, if you know that leads looking for “digital marketing courses” are extremely precious to your Gurgaon agency, you can target in-market audiences who are searching for marketing services. Although the reach is broad, the audience targeting allows you to concentrate on the right users, which are actually close to the business goals.

Tips for Effective Audience Targeting:

Try different levels of audiences: in-market and affinity audiences and narrow down the best.
Activate “Target & Bid” and “Observation” options: If you want to have restrictions on your ads on those selected audiences, activate the “Target & Bid”, and if you do not want to restrict, the “Observation” activates it.
Audience performance report: Auditing to concentrate on the performing sectors for future campaigns.

At The End

If used the right way, broad match is an aggressive extension for the reach; with negative keywords, smart bid, and audience layers incorporated, one would get suitable traffic with high efficiency at a decent cost. Either you run a digital agency in Gurgaon, or something else, following these ideas would make best use of the broad-matching facility.