SF Digital Studios

There are dozens of guides explaining Google Ads match types . Almost all of them stop at the definitions. You finish reading, you can now describe all three, and you still don’t know which one to use on Monday morning. That’s the gap this post is for. Not what the match types are. Which one belongs in your account, given your budget, this month. We’ll use the largest public dataset on the question to settle the argument, then give you a rule you can apply in ninety seconds. There Are Three. There Used To Be Four. Start here, because a surprising number of guides still ranking on page one get this wrong. Google Ads has three keyword match types: broad, phrase and exact. Until 2021, there was a fourth called broad match modifier . You put a plus sign in front of the words that had to appear, and Google had to honour it. Google retired it and folded its behaviour into phrase match. If a guide tells you there are four match types, it’s teaching a system that stopped existing five years ag...