Selecting the Right Match Type For Your Paid Search Campaign

[mandy]

Most major search engines offer three match-type options:

Exact. Your ad appears when people type in “red sweater,” using only those words, precisely in that order. With this tailor-fit text, you can maximize your conversion rates with the exact match for specific “long tail” keywords.

Broad. This option is called “advanced” on Yahoo. Your ad text appears with many queries, such as “red cashmere women’s sweater” or even “red sweatshirt.” This leads to a lot of clicks but also to a high bounce rate. Negative keywords or “excluded” words on Yahoo can prevent this. Search engines will not display your ad text for queries containing a specified negative keyword.

This tactic reduces costs by using negatives to filter out irrelevant queries for broad and phrase matches. For example, if you sell only new sweaters, you should specify “second hand” and “used” as negative keywords.

Phrase. Your ad text appears for the precise phrase “red sweater.” For example, “cashmere red sweater” would trigger your ad, but “red cashmere sweater” would not...

full article: http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/search...42092.html

A related article on Google's new Expanded Match:

Expanded match, according to Google’s definition is:

    With broad match, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren’t in your keyword lists. Keyword variations can include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords....

There are three main types of expanded match results you should be primarily concerned with:
1. Synonyms...
2.  Misspellings...
3. Other Languages...

full article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/googl...ters/5454/