You will be able to choose match types and build negative keyword lists that keep spend on relevant searches.
Two weeks into her first Search campaign, Priya opened a report she had not looked at before and found her ads had appeared for tuition jobs Tampines, part time maths tutor salary, free P5 maths worksheets and maths tuition Johor Bahru. People had clicked on some of them. Each click cost her money, and none of those people were parents looking for a class in Tampines.
Her keywords were fine. What she had not controlled was which searches those keywords were allowed to match, and which searches she had told Google to stay away from. Those two controls, match types and negative keywords, decide where a Search budget actually goes.
When you add a keyword to Google Ads, you also choose a match type. It tells Google how closely a person's search must match your keyword for your ad to be eligible. There are three.
Exact match is the tightest. Your ad can show on searches that have the same meaning as your keyword, or the same intent. In a report or editor you mark it with square brackets, such as [p5 maths tuition tampines].
Phrase match is in the middle. Your ad can show on searches that include the meaning of your keyword, possibly with words before or after. It is marked with quotation marks, such as "maths tuition tampines", which might match a search for best maths tuition tampines for p5.
Broad match is the loosest. Your ad can show on searches related to your keyword, which may not contain the keyword's words at all. Google uses signals such as the person's recent searches and the content of your landing page to judge relevance.
Google has widened all three over the years. Exact match used to mean the exact words. It now includes close variants such as misspellings, plurals and searches Google judges to mean the same thing. Phrase match absorbed what used to be a separate, narrower option. So even exact match is not as exact as its name suggests, and Google's help pages carry the current definitions with examples.
Broad match gives Google the most room to find searches you would never have thought of. Some of those will be valuable. Some will be the tuition jobs searches that caught Priya.
Google's own guidance is that broad match works best paired with smart bidding, its automated bid strategies that set a bid for each auction based on how likely that search is to convert. With good conversion tracking, the system can learn which loosely related searches bring bookings and bid down on the rest. Without tracking, broad match has no way to tell a parent from a job seeker, and spends on both.
So the choice depends on your setup. If your tracking is tested and you are using a conversion-focused bid strategy, broad match can work well, especially alongside a strong negative list. If you are starting with little data or a tight budget, phrase and exact match give you more control while the account learns. Many advertisers start there and add broad match later. Lesson 8.2, Bid strategies: manual, automated and targets, covers the bidding side.
A negative keyword tells Google not to show your ad when a search contains that word or phrase. It is the most direct way to stop paying for clicks you do not want.
Some negatives apply to almost every business. Free, jobs, job, career, salary, hiring, internship, DIY, template and download filter out people looking for work or for something without paying. Others are specific to you. Priya added tutor jobs, part time, become a tutor, worksheets, past year papers, Johor and JB, plus the names of subjects and levels she does not teach.
Negative keywords have match types too, and by default they do not stretch to close variants the way normal keywords do. If you want to exclude both job and jobs, add both. Google lets you save negatives in a shared list and apply it to several campaigns, which saves rebuilding it each time.
Be careful not to block what you want. A negative of tuition would stop every ad Priya has. Read your list back against your own keywords before saving it.
The report Priya found is the search terms report. It shows the actual searches that triggered your ads, with clicks, costs and conversions for each. It is the best source of negative keywords you will ever have, because it shows exactly where your money went.
Check it weekly, at least while a campaign is new. Look for searches that are irrelevant, outside your area, or from people who want something you do not sell, and add negatives for them. Look also for good searches you had not thought of, and consider adding them as keywords. Google does not show every search term, for privacy reasons, but it shows enough to steer by.
After a month of weekly checks, Priya's list had grown from fifteen negatives to more than forty, and almost all her clicks came from parents in the east.
Start your own list now, before the search terms report has anything in it. In the activity below you will write a starting negative keyword list for your business.
Write a starting negative keyword list of at least fifteen terms for your business.
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