The alternative title for this post was “The Little Keyword Match Type That Could”, however as Google insists, the Broad Match Modifier, or BMM is not a match type at all, but rather, as the name suggests, a “modifier”.

The BMM was touted as “a new AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords that have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match”. It was rolled out as a beta feature to the Canadian and UK regions back in May of this year, as a way to entice those marketers to spend more ad dollars, with a promise of more clicks at a decent Return On Ad Spend, or ROAS.

Apparently Google’s clients in these two regions were extremely cautious on using anything but exact match keywords or phrase matching, broad match, it seemed, clearly had a sign marked, ‘Dragons’.

This actually makes a lot of sense, as any keyword on broad match has the potential to be the ‘big keyword on the block’, with more impressions and clicks than the other two match types combined, and as a result, can increase costs two or three times fold, snowballing out by multiple keywords and ad groups.

So, to find a happy medium, Google introduced this new feature, somewhere between phrase match and broad match, without the ominous threat of any pigeons entering anyone’s bank account, vis-a-vis a runaway Google Adwords Account (which should never happen in the first place, but I’ll save that for another post).

During this time, adoption seemed slow, speaking to colleagues in the industry, though I do not have any official hard data from Google, (who have started to roll out the feature for the US and global market since July, “after a successful open beta test in the UK and Canada”).

Also speaking with some in the Search Marketing field, there are those online marketers who were unsure how to use the broad match modifier (where does the plus sign go again?), and still others were wondering how this would work with reporting, i.e. a big fat #NAME? Excel Formula Fail.

The law of diminishing returns also comes into play, where having three, four, or five words in a keyword string (for long tail searches) increases the possibilities of modified groupings by almost infinite amounts, with only a marginal uptake on traffic. Here, clearly the work involved to set up such a campaign outweighs any gains.

What is most interesting is that Google has flagged the BMM with these two curious comments, the important take aways have been bolded, or ‘stronged’ to be semantically correct.

“If you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today, adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an ROI comparable to that of your phrase match keywords”

and

“It’s also important to know that switching high volume existing broad match keywords to modified broad match will likely lead to a significant decline in click and conversion volumes and will not directly improve Quality Score.”

In testing and use of the Broad Match Modifier, over many different accounts, ad groups, and various keywords, it can be clearly stated that these two comments are not always true, and somewhat misleading if their meaning is applied generally.

Although, in some instances the broad match modifier did perform just as Google said it would, there were other cases where:

(1) Broad Match Modified keywords performed better than phrase match keywords.

(2) Broad Match Modified keywords received more share of impressions than the regular broad match version did, and more clicks as a result.

(3) Quality scores improved after adding Broad Match Modified keywords to an ad group.

Having this information, you should act by beginning to test the BMM if you haven’t done so already, and definitely don’t be shy in experimenting with different BMM combinations, as clearly there are wins to be had by using this feature (tip: it works on Mobile too!).

My personal request for my peers (or Googleplex) is to create a tool that will take a keyword and output the match type variations you want, with checks for Exact, Phrase, Broad, and BMM, with a nice import function directly into Adwords! Now that’s a #ProductivityTool that would save time!

If you have any questions, findings, or opinions on the broad match modifier for Google Adwords, please use the comments section below.

Material sources for this post and further reading can be found at:
Google Ads Innovations
New keyword targeting feature for advertisers in the UK and Canada
New keyword targeting feature rolling out globally