What is Exact Match in PPC?

Exact match is a keyword matching option within PPC platforms (Google Adwords, Bing, Ads, and Yahoo). It is the most focused keyword matching option that allows advertisers to target specific keywords that exactly match user queries (and close variants). Most PPC platforms set exact match keywords in brackets like this [exact match keyword].

So if you bid on the exact match keyword [red running shoes], you should expect to see search queries that match that keyword as well as close variants, misspellings, and plurals. A few examples of what could come up include:

• red running shoes
• red running shoe
• red runner shoes
• red runner shoe
• red running sohe
• red runnin shoe

What did Google change in 2017 for exact match keywords?

In the past exact match keywords prevented search queries that didn’t exactly match your keyword. Google’s recent change should shake things up a bit and allow keywords in a different order as well as prepositions, conjunctions, and articles to be included in exact match eligible queries.

So, using the example above, there will be even more eligible queries for the exact match keyword [red running shoes]. Some of the new queries might include.

• red running shoes
• running shoes red
• shoes running red
• red shoes for running

Google estimates that this change would boost exact match traffic by close to 3%.