Search Spring Cleaning Guest Post #2 – Match Type Segmentation Best Practices

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Match Type Segmentation. Today’s guest contributor for Search Spring Cleaning Week is David Thai, VP of Paid Search for Reprise. In this post, David reveals why closely managing match type segmentation is a critical part of paid search success. 

Within paid search, Match Type segmentation is an important best practice as it relates to structure, performance, and optimization. Keywords are the connection point between a consumer and a brand in search engine advertising so ensuring the relevancy and maximization of each variation is going to define success.

There are three methods of segmentation:

• None/Wild Wild West (multiple Match Types within an Ad Group)  🙁
• Ad Group level (single Match Type per Ad Group)  😐
• Campaign level (single Match Type per Campaign)  🙂

Match type segmentation – the value to paid search advertisers

The campaign level is the ideal scenario for tighter control and balancing out volume vs. efficiency. Since budgets are set at the campaign level, advertisers have the flexibility of putting more dollars towards top performers, which typically is on Exact match keywords. With this approach, there is much less potential of wasted spend and it makes it easier for marketers to scale up or down.

When Match Types are not at the campaign level, you run the risk of having inefficient variations cannibalizing the budget, especially within Broad and Phrase match keywords. To make your budget work as hard as possible, take a tiered approach by maximizing Exact SOV (Share of Voice) before putting budget towards Phrase/BMM(Modified Broad)/Broad.

Another benefit of this is when using automated bid strategies because those are applied at the campaign level as well. The ability to group similar-performing segments together and towards the same goal will drive even more efficiency. As a bonus, utilizing labeling or having a structured naming convention will help with overall management. While segmenting this way will naturally result in many more campaigns to manage, implementing automated rules/alerts or using 3rd-party tools like Skai makes it a breeze!

Match type segmentation in action

Whenever it comes to auditing existing or new accounts, Match type segmentation is one of the first things I analyze to determine the health of the structure. When our agency won the business for a major fast casual/food chain client, this was one of the first things we recommended as the incumbent agency had it segmented at an Ad Group level.

We quickly identified that the top performing Exact keywords were not given a chance to serve as a result of Broad keywords having higher bids and irrelevant queries were being matched. After our team restructured the entire account with the proper segmentation, we immediately saw an impact on performance upwards of 20% within the first month.

Action Steps

In summary, to get the most benefit from your match type segmentation strategy:

1. Segment Match Types by Campaign level
2. Take a tiered approach by maximizing top performers
3. Utilize proper naming conventions/labels/3rd party tool to help with the management
4. Complement this tactic by adding Negative keywords to further reduce wasted spend
5. Find the right balance between volume & efficiency based on expectations and performance

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