How will the retirement of Broad Match Modified keywords affect your Google Ads performance? A former Googler shares his script for measuring the impact.
In today’s volatile world, few things are certain, but change in Google Ads is one thing we can reliably predict. And so Google announced last week that another change is coming to keyword match types. Broad match modified keywords will cease to exist and their functionality will be absorbed into phrase match keywords.
As a big advocate of using technology to keep your sanity when Google makes changes that would otherwise take up a lot of time to adapt to, I am sharing another free Google Ads script—this one to help predict the impact that Google’s latest change will have on your accounts.
You’ll find a single account and MCC version of the script at the end of this post.
What Is the Broad Match Modified Keyword Match Type?
There are four types of match types: exact, phrase, broad, and negative.
Each is designed to help advertisers specify how closely a user’s query should match their chosen keyword before an ad is triggered.
Google has long maintained that about 15% of all searches done by users are unique enough that it would be impossible for advertisers to have an exact match keyword (where the keyword has to be an almost exact match to the search query).
This is why match types like phrase and broad exist: in order to show ads when the search query is related to the keyword, but maybe uses additional or slightly different words.
But while advertisers often enjoy the additional conversions they can get by giving Google some flexibility with match types, there are instances where advertisers want a hybrid keyword match type approach.
They want to specify certain words in the keyword that are critical to the business while being less strict about other words.
For example, with the keyword [hotels in Miami], a boutique hotel that only has a location in Miami probably will be pretty strict about wanting the word “Miami” to be part of the search.
But they might be okay with changing the word “hotel” to “lodging” because they could satisfy the needs of either user.
This advertiser could specify this preference by adding a plus symbol “+” in front of the critical words in a broad match keyword: [hotels in +Miami].
This modified version of a broad match keyword is called a broad match modified (BMM) keyword.
Taking the same example but considering an advertiser representing a global hotel chain with hundreds of locations, they may be more strict about wanting the word “hotels” to be preserved because they find that when their ads show for searches that include the word “motels,” their conversion rate is lower because their properties tend to be higher-end and more expensive.
They would have the BMM keyword [+hotels in Miami].
Full vs. Partial BMM
In gauging the impact of Google’s…
