Why Your Broad Match Isn’t Working
The broad match campaign looked perfect in the forecast: big reach, aggressive bids, smart bidding turned on. Two weeks later, the search term report is full of junk, costs are climbing, and the only thing growing is frustration. Broad match was supposed to be the shortcut to more conversions, not a black hole for budget.
That experience is common, not a personal failure. Broad match genuinely drives a huge share of non-brand traffic in real accounts. In one IAB Hungary report on Google Ads performance, broad match keywords accounted for 30% of non-brand keyword clicks in a single quarter, which shows how much volume they can unlock. When broad match doesn’t work, it’s usually because the strategy, guardrails, and measurement are off – not because the match type is “bad” by default.
The good news: fixing broad match performance is possible. It just requires treating it like a powerful but unpredictable ally, not a set-and-forget toggle. This guide breaks down why broad match often fails and what to do differently, so those campaigns finally earn their place in the account instead of sitting on the chopping block.
Broad Match Isn’t Broken - But Your Setup Might Be
Broad match has evolved far beyond the old “match anything vaguely related” days. It now leans heavily on machine learning, user intent signals, and contextual data. That shift is exactly why some advertisers are thriving with it while others are burning through cash. The difference usually isn’t the market. It’s how the match type is being used.
Several experienced performance agencies and practitioners now treat broad match as a core building block rather than a risky experiment. One performance agency even calls out that “broad match can be an essential element to a well-structured search campaign”, pointing to its role in scaling volume when paired with the right structure and automation. When a tactic shows up consistently in winning accounts, the problem usually isn’t the tool itself – it’s how that tool is configured.
So if broad match is failing, it’s worth assuming the setup is guilty until proven innocent. Weak negatives, misaligned bidding, fuzzy targeting, and unrealistic expectations almost always show up in the post-mortem. The rest of this article walks through each of those failure points and how to turn them around.
Reason 1: You’re Letting Broad Match Run Without Guardrails
Broad match is designed to explore. That’s its strength and its risk. When it doesn’t work, the search term report usually tells a simple story: the campaign was allowed to explore everything, including traffic that should never have been eligible in the first place. The goal isn’t to stop exploration; it’s to control where exploration happens.
There are a few classic “no-guardrail” patterns that sink broad match performance. The first is running broad keywords on generic, single-word terms such as “software,” “shoes,” or “marketing.” Those phrases carry wildly different intents, from research to jobs to tutorials, and broad match will happily chase all of them if allowed. The second pattern is skipping a serious negative keyword build at launch. Without strong negatives around “free,” “jobs,” “definition,” “what is,” and other research-intent queries, the algorithm wastes precious learning budget on users who were never going to convert.
Location and language settings quietly magnify the problem. A broad campaign targeting “all countries and territories,” or one that allows multiple languages by default, can match to users searching in ways the creative and landing pages simply don’t address. This mismatch forces the bidding system to learn through failure instead of learning from tight, relevant signals. That slows down optimization and makes broad match look worse than it actually is.
Define non-negotiable negatives before launch (competitors you don’t want to pay for, job-related terms, “free,” low-intent modifiers).
Start with more specific, multi-word broad keywords (e.g., “b2b inventory management software” instead of just “inventory software”).
Lock in precise locations and realistic language settings that align with sales coverage and support.
Reason 2: Your Bidding Strategy Fights How Broad Match Works
Even smartly structured broad match campaigns fail when the bidding strategy pushes in the wrong direction. Broad match tends to introduce more variability into auctions: more types of queries, wider ranges of intent, and different user profiles. If bidding is laser-focused only on the cheapest conversions, it often suppresses the very traffic that could be the most valuable long term.
One large-scale analysis of 16,825 search campaigns found that broad match could deliver higher revenue per conversion even when it came with higher cost per acquisition. That study, published by Adalysis, showed that the “expensive” conversions driven by broad match were often worth more, producing stronger revenue numbers overall despite the higher CPAs in their Search Engine Land summary. Accounts that judged performance solely on CPA missed that upside completely.
This is where bidding strategy either unlocks or sabotages broad match. A target CPA that is set too low throttles impression share before the algorithm even has enough learning data. Manual CPC, combined with broad match, often swings between overpaying for irrelevant clicks and losing auctions that actually matter. On the other hand, value-based bidding strategies like target ROAS, fed with accurate conversion values, give broad match the space to pursue higher-value users instead of simply the cheapest clicks.
Align bidding with business value, not just lead volume: use conversion values whenever possible, especially for e-commerce or clear revenue events.
Avoid setting aggressive target CPAs from day one; let the campaign collect enough data, then tighten goals gradually.
Isolate broad match into its own campaigns or ad groups so bidding strategies can be tuned to its behavior rather than averaged across match types.
Reason 3: You’re Judging Broad Match By Exact-Match Rules
Exact match and broad match are built to play different roles. Exact is about control and precision; broad is about scale and discovery. Using exact-match expectations to judge broad performance almost guarantees disappointment. The data supports this gap very clearly.
In one study, 85.65% of accounts saw better click-through rates from exact match keywords compared with broad match versions as reported from Optmyzr’s analysis. That result is not an indictment of broad match. It simply reflects the reality that exact match, by definition, shows ads on a tightly controlled set of queries that should be highly relevant. Broad match will always attract more marginal queries, and that dilutes CTR.
The mistake is assuming lower CTR or a slightly weaker conversion rate means broad match “doesn’t work.” Broad’s job is different. It’s supposed to surface new queries, new audiences, and sometimes new offers or messages that wouldn’t appear through pure exact coverage. If broad match discovers profitable themes that can later be isolated into exact or phrase, it has already done its job even if its headline metrics look weaker than those “perfect” exact match campaigns.
Compare broad match against its own baseline and contribution to new-query discovery, not just side by side with exact match KPIs.
Promote proven search terms from broad into their own exact or phrase ad groups once they show consistent performance.
Use different goals for exploratory broad campaigns (e.g., acceptable CPA range + query discovery) versus mature exact campaigns (tight CPA or ROAS targets).
Reason 4: You Didn’t Adjust For Google’s Match Type Changes
Many advertisers still judge broad match using experiences from years ago, but the match type ecosystem has changed significantly. Phrase match has been expanded, broad match modifier was removed, and close variants continue to pull in more queries that don’t literally match the keyword text. All of this blurs the line between match types and makes old structures less reliable.
A key shift arrived when Google announced that phrase match would expand to cover additional broad match modifier traffic. That change, highlighted in an analysis by Search Engine Journal, made phrase match significantly more flexible by design, overlapping much more of the territory that used to be reserved for broad match modifier alone when they reported on the mid-February 2021 update. As a result, some advertisers who thought they were building tight phrase-only structures were actually operating with more “broad-like” behavior than they realized.
If broad match is layered on top of these evolved phrase and exact settings without a fresh strategy, chaos follows. Duplicated intent, overlapping queries, and competing bids across match types can confuse bidding systems and skew performance reporting. Broad may look like the villain in the data, but it’s often just the most obvious scapegoat in an account structure that wasn’t modernized for the new rules of matching.
Audit current match type coverage: identify where phrase and close variants are already providing broad-like reach.
Reduce overlap: decide which match type “owns” which intents rather than letting all three compete freely on the same themes.
Review historical experiments: if broad testing was done before major match type updates, treat those results as outdated, not definitive.
Reason 5: Weak Creative And Landing Pages Magnify Broad Match Waste
Broad match doesn’t only expose targeting weaknesses; it also reveals whether creative and landing pages are strong enough to convert less-than-perfect traffic. Exact match often hides these weaknesses because users arrive on highly specific queries with clear purchase intent. Once broader intent enters the picture, fluffy messaging and generic pages start to collapse.
When search terms drift slightly away from the ideal keyword, ad copy needs to do more work. It has to qualify the user, clearly promise a benefit, and let the wrong people self-select out. That means sharper headlines, explicit mentions of pricing or eligibility when appropriate, and dynamic insertion that actually makes sense for the query. Simply recycling the same safe, generic ad copy that worked with exact match is rarely enough for broad traffic.
Landing pages carry the same burden. A page focused entirely on one narrow scenario, with no content for related but different needs, will underperform when broad match sends in a more varied audience. Strong broad match setups often lean on modular pages: sections for different use cases, industries, or problem statements that still lead to the same core conversion but speak to different intents. Without that flexibility, the extra traffic broad match delivers turns into higher bounce rates instead of more revenue.
Write at least one ad in each ad group that explicitly qualifies users (“For B2B teams,” “For companies with 50+ employees,” etc.).
Use search term insights from broad campaigns to expand on-page messaging around common pain points or use cases.
Test intent-specific landing experiences for the largest new themes discovered via broad traffic.
How To Fix Underperforming Broad Match Step by Step
Rescuing broad match doesn’t require burning everything down. In most accounts, a focused series of adjustments over a few weeks can turn a “never again” experience into a reliable growth channel. The key is to tackle structure, negatives, bidding, and measurement in a deliberate order rather than tweaking everything at once.
Start with structure. Pull broad match keywords into their own dedicated campaigns or at least their own ad groups, instead of mixing them with exact and phrase. This makes performance easier to read and gives bidding strategies a clean slate. While doing that, tighten targeting settings so geography, language, and device coverage match real-world buyers rather than theoretical reach.
Next, overhaul negatives and search term hygiene. Go through recent search term reports and:
Block clearly irrelevant themes outright with account-level negatives.
Add campaign-level or ad group-level negatives to prevent internal overlap between product lines or services.
Create “promotion lists” of strong-performing search terms to move into exact or phrase campaigns with their own budgets.
Only after those basics are in place should bidding changes begin. Make sure conversion tracking is clean, deduplicated, and includes only meaningful actions. Then, if possible, move toward smart bidding strategies that align with actual value: target ROAS for e-commerce, or target CPA with well-defined lead quality filters. Resist the temptation to strangulate broad match with an ultra-low target CPA until enough data has accumulated under the new structure.
Finally, refresh creative and landing experiences in parallel. Craft at least one “qualifying” ad per ad group and adapt landing pages to speak to the broader set of pains and contexts that broad match reveals. Report on broad’s success not purely by its own CPA, but by the pipeline of new themes and profitable exact keywords it discovers over time.
Where Broad Match Actually Makes Sense
Broad match is not the hero of every campaign. Treating it as a universal best practice is just as harmful as avoiding it entirely. It shines specifically in situations where discovery, scale, and flexibility matter more than tight control over every impression.
New markets or product launches are the most obvious use cases. When there is no historical data, exact-only structures lock campaigns into a small, pre-defined view of how people “should” search. Broad match, combined with sensible negatives and smart bidding, lets the market speak back, surfacing language and intents that internal teams didn’t anticipate. That feedback loop is often more valuable than the initial conversions themselves.
Broad match also plays well in accounts that are already mature on exact and phrase. Once core terms are maxed out, incremental growth usually comes from either better creative or new audiences. Broad match contributes to both: it finds new queries to turn into exact keywords and exposes new sub-segments of users who convert well when messaged properly. In those environments, broad isn’t a random experiment; it’s the R&D engine for the rest of the account.
Use broad match in campaigns where learning and scale are explicit goals, not just raw efficiency.
Keep broad out of brand-only campaigns and hyper-limited budgets where every wasted click hurts.
Pair broad with strong analytics so new opportunities can be promoted into higher-control structures quickly.
Why Work With North Country Consulting On Broad Match
Broad match success is rarely about one clever trick. It comes from systematic testing, clear measurement, and the discipline to let data-not fear-guide decisions. That combination of strategic patience and tactical rigor is where we, at North Country Consulting, focus our efforts.
We design broad match programs to earn their place in the account, not just to follow the latest platform recommendation. That means building dedicated test structures, aligning bidding with real business value, and using insights from broad traffic to strengthen exact and phrase campaigns rather than cannibalize them. When a study shows, for example, that broad match keywords can come in with lower cost per conversion but also a lower conversion rate compared to exact match as documented in Search Engine Land’s analysis, we don’t see that as a reason to avoid broad. We see it as a reason to segment and optimize so that each match type does the job it’s best suited for.
Our approach is straightforward: protect budget with strong guardrails, unlock upside with thoughtful experimentation, and translate raw performance into real revenue impact. Advertisers who are tired of broad match feeling like a gamble tend to appreciate that balance. Broad match isn’t going away; platforms are leaning into it more each year. Partnering with a team that knows how to harness it safely and profitably is no longer a luxury-it’s the difference between scaling efficiently and paying tuition to the algorithm every quarter.
Ready to transform your Google Ads performance and make broad match work for you? At North Country Consulting, our deep expertise in digital marketing and revops, rooted in our founder's extensive experience at Google and leading revenue teams, positions us to elevate your campaigns. Don't let broad match be a source of frustration—let it be a growth engine. Book a free consultation with us today and start turning insights into action.