Broad match is not your strategy. It’s Google’s.
I had a client spending $70 a day on a commercial epoxy flooring campaign in Philadelphia. Good service, good margins, real business. They watched a YouTube video that said broad match was the future of Google Ads. Smart Bidding plus broad match plus Google’s AI equals magic. So they switched everything over.
135 clicks later, zero conversions. Not one.
Here’s what happened. The broad match keywords were triggering on searches like “epoxy epoxy” — which isn’t even a real query, it’s Google’s matching algorithm having a stroke. They were showing up for DIY searches, job seeker searches, people looking for epoxy resin art supplies. The campaign was hemorrhaging money on traffic that had absolutely nothing to do with commercial floor coatings.
Meanwhile, the exact match and phrase match keywords in the same account? Converting at 11%. Thirteen percent on some terms. The data was right there.
This is the part that drives me insane about the broad match conversation in this industry. Google tells you to use broad match because broad match is good for Google. More impressions, more clicks, more spend. Google’s incentive is to show your ad to as many people as possible. Your incentive is to show your ad to people who will actually become customers. These are not the same incentive.
The YouTube gurus who push broad match are either running it on branded campaigns where it barely matters, or they’re spending enough money that the waste doesn’t kill them. If you’re a local business spending $2,000 to $5,000 a month, broad match will eat you alive.
Here’s what I actually do. I start every campaign with exact match and phrase match only. I let the data tell me what’s converting. Then — and only then — do I test broad match on the proven winners, with tight negative keyword lists and daily search term monitoring. Broad match is a scaling tool for campaigns that already work. It is not a starting strategy.
The difference between the advertisers who make Google Ads work and the ones who burn through budget is almost never the keywords themselves. It’s match type discipline. Control what you can, then expand when you’ve earned the right to.