What is Broad Match?

Broad match is the widest of the three keyword match types. Your ad is eligible when the query contains the keyword's words in any order, and Amazon may also serve on synonyms, related terms and variations it judges to share the same intent.

What broad match is doing for you

Broad is a discovery instrument. You are not buying a query, you are buying access to a neighbourhood of queries so that the search term report can tell you which parts of it are worth owning. Take the keyword water bottle. Broad may serve on bottle for water, on insulated flask, and on water bottle for kids. The first two are legitimate discoveries. The third may be irrelevant if your product is an adult range, and it will keep costing money until it is excluded.

Read the terms, never the keyword line

Because a broad keyword mixes intents, its aggregate ACoS is a blended number and a poor decision input. Cutting the bid on a broad keyword suppresses the good queries along with the bad ones. The correct sequence is:

1. Pull the search term report for the keyword.
2. Break the terms into word groups, single words then pairs then triples, and total spend and orders per group.
3. Exclude the groups that are irrelevant, using negative phrase where a whole theme is wrong.
4. Leave the terms that are merely expensive to bid work, not to negation.

Waste in a broad campaign is rarely one costly term. It is usually a large number of small terms sharing one wrong word.

Worked example

Suppose a broad keyword produced clicks across two hundred distinct queries, and one word appears in a third of them and in none of the orders. Excluding that one word at phrase level removes a slice of waste that no term-by-term review would have found, because no single term spent enough to look important.

Bidding and patience at broad

A broad keyword should normally carry the lowest bid of the three match types on the same root, because it is buying the least qualified traffic. It also deserves the longest patience before a non-converting target is judged. Shurq's bid engine expresses that patience as money: the spend a non-converting target may accumulate before its bid decays is two times unit cost of goods, multiplied by a match factor of 1.75 at broad against 1.0 at exact, subject to a floor of eight clicks so that inexpensive products are not judged on noise.

Sponsored Brands additionally offers a modified broad form, where a plus prefix marks a word as required in the query. Where that option exists, standard unmodified broad is usually the weaker choice.