How to work my keywords - should I use exact, broad and phrase match in the same adgroup?

[Gordon_Hall]

I'm looking at my adwords, and am looking to strengthen them, improve quality score by making the wording more appropriate, and ensuring they link to a more relevant page rather than just my home page.

In an AdGroup should I be using all three (broad, exact and phrase) or does this just confuse Google.

What are the advantages/disadvantages?

When I was doing the keyword research, for some of my phrases, there was little difference in price (sometimes as low as a 3p difference) between a broad match (with large potential numbers) and an exact match (with a tiny target group) so it would seem best that I target the broad match - make sense?

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hi Gordon,

We use [exact] and look at the local (which is in the US) for projects within the US. If the project is global we look at global.

Targeting broad may be cheaper but might not have a good ROI. My bes response is experiment and keep you eye on analytics. What is working? what is not working? etc...

In definition:

Select a match type to see the monthly traffic volume for a keyword with that match type.

How it works: The table shows approximately how much traffic a keyword with a selected match type gets on Google.

Broad: The sum of the search volumes for the keyword, related grammatical forms, synonyms, and related words

Exact: The search volume for that specific keyword and close variants

Phrase: The sum of search volumes that include the whole phrase or near variants of the whole phrase

[KenyonManu3-SEOSEM]

Bryan is exactly right exact is going to be the most targeted. broad can get good impressions and  but might have bad ROI. If you are going to do broad make sure you do add negative keywords. Example you are selling sprint phones you could add it as a broad keyword in the same adgroup but you would want to add some negatives as well like: I hate sprint phones or sprint phones suck. That way you won't get impressions that aren't relevant. Anytime you get irrelevant impressions, they don't get clicked your ctr goes down and you quality score goes down. when quality score goes down your cost goes up. So just do it the right way and save money.

What you really should be thinking about is best practices for your overall account structure. meaning make sure your ad groups are built based on best practices. that will ensure users are sent to the most relevant pages and that way you don't waste money. Also google will look at account structure and relevance when evaluating your account wide quality score, which will factor in to the quality score they assign each keyword.

Your smart by focusing on quality score. In my opinion that is where most people waste money. It is critical to really understand how the bidding and adwords auction systems works every time a query is entered.