My feeling is one of relief to hear that Google have enabled tighter definitions of broad match on Google adWords.

I first came accross the issues with Google AdWords definition of broad match when they started touting a feature called extended broad match. Extended broad match took the term you were bidding on and assumed you were relevant for synonims of that term too; “great I dont have to think of all those words!” RIGHT?

The issue is when a word is ambiguous like “book” (read a book, book a flight). Now I have to admit that the folks at Google got smarter at the extended broad match thing, or the algorythm got smarter, but they could have saved themselves some hasstle, and us a lot of negative keywords, by introducing what has just gone global.

What is Modified Broad Match?

The graphic below from the Google AdWords Blog shows Broad, Phrase and Exact match types, with the outer ring being the behavior of broad match without modifications.

google modified broad match

Now if only I could have had this about three years ago…

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