Pros and Cons of match type structures in Google Ads

What is match type campaign structure in Google Ads

As we saw in our post about keyword match types, Google Ads provides us with a lot of options when it comes to targeting search terms. This flexibility can be leveraged to run more efficient campaigns, groups and ads.

Match type structure is the practice of setting up campaigns, groups, and ads in your account in a way that allows for maximum control over the flow of search queries impressions and clicks to specific match types. This can be done by splitting match types into separate campaigns/ ad groups, a more complex way of setting up negativization, single keyword ad groups, and a few other campaign structure practices.

Main challenges of managing a match type campaign structure

Advanced PPC managers may be comfortable getting out the most of matching types and even using them to create specific campaign structures, as we explained in this post. But all of this comes with added complexity and manual work, which less experienced managers or agencies may not be inclined to deal with. 

In this post we'll break down the main challenges when managing an account with multiple match types:

1. Search query mining

Here is a paradox. Your groups and campaigns work better in exact match, but you can’t find new profitable keywords to target if you don’t have at least a campaign or group with broad match keywords. Search query mining is the process of extracting good search terms (specific and high converting) from broad match keywords.

2. Adding new keywords and negative terms

This is a challenge you’ll also have to worry about in phrase and broad match campaigns and groups. Broad match keywords will generally bring the highest traffic, while also having generally higher CPCs than other match types (since they are less specific and your quality score may be lower).

So, with this in mind, your goal is to “fish out” good terms and add them to the phrase or exact match type groups or campaigns. The more you do this, the better your campaigns will work.

Similarly, the wide net cast by broad match keywords (and to a lesser degree phrase match keywords too) will allow you to spot terms you may need to set up as a negative keyword. If you slack in this task, your broad groups and campaigns will accumulate more and more wasted budget, because of clicks to totally irrelevant keywords. So this is something you may want to do every day.

3. Cross negativization (Duplicate traffic)

It is possible that you find that some search terms are appearing in more than one group or campaign. This means you will have to decide where that specific term is performing better, and then add it as a negative term in the group or campaign where it’s performing worse. This way, you ensure that the term will always trigger your most effective ad group, again contributing to reducing the amount of budget you waste and improving the general performance of your campaigns.

This is a rather manual task unless you have the help of OrbitalAds, which automates this.

4. Other manual work

Those are not all the manual tasks that you may face when running a Google Ads campaign, whether based on a match type structure or not. Other things you still need to have in mind (and actually have time to execute) are adding third-party keywords, and monitoring / improving your quality score, to name some of them.

We also wrote in detail about all the manual tasks involved in running Hagakure type campaigns, which may be useful and applicable to other types of campaign structures too.

How OrbitalAds manages match type structures

OrbitalAds is built to ease the burden around manual tasks like search query mining and cross negativization. So this means you can have the best of both worlds: the superior flexibility of a match-type structure, without the added hassle of spending too much time in manual tasks - because OrbitalAds takes care of that for you.

Don’t forget to check everything that OrbitalAds can do for you - it’s an AI-based tool for PPC managers and agencies that want to reduce complexity and focus on what matters most!