A search campaign runs on keywords, but a keyword is not a search — it is an instruction about which searches your ad should enter the auction for. Match types control how loose or tight that instruction is, and getting them wrong is the fastest way to waste a budget.
| Type | Written as | Matches |
|---|---|---|
| Broad | laptop repair | Anything the platform judges related — including terms with no shared words |
| Phrase | "laptop repair" | Searches containing that meaning, with words before or after |
| Exact | [laptop repair] | That search and close variants — misspellings, plurals, reorderings |
The trade is straightforward. Broad reaches the most people and wastes the most money. Exact wastes the least and reaches the fewest. Neither extreme is right on its own.
All three match types have loosened over the years — even exact match now includes what platforms call "close variants", which is a wider net than the name suggests. The practical implication is that you cannot assume your ads only show for what you typed. Checking what they actually matched is not optional.
This is the most important report in a search campaign, and the most commonly ignored. It shows the actual queries people typed that triggered your ads — as distinct from the keywords you entered.
The gap between the two is regularly startling. An advertiser bidding on "laptop repair" on broad match may find they paid for "laptop repair jobs", "free laptop repair tutorial", "how to repair a laptop yourself", and "laptop repair course" — none of which are customers.
Reading this report and acting on it is the single highest-value routine task in paid search.
A negative keyword prevents your ad from showing for searches containing that word. It is how you close the gaps the search terms report reveals.
Common negatives for most businesses: free, jobs, salary, course, tutorial, diy, how to, and the names of competitors you do not want to bid against. Each one prevents an entire category of irrelevant clicks.
Negative keywords are the closest thing to free money in paid search. Every one you add stops paying for clicks that were never going to convert, and the effect is permanent rather than requiring ongoing management.
From the auction lesson: relevance affects both whether you win and what you pay. In search specifically, that means the chain from keyword to ad to landing page should be consistent. Someone searching for laptop repair should see an ad about laptop repair, and land on a page about laptop repair — not a homepage.
Breaking that chain is the most common cause of expensive clicks that go nowhere, and it is entirely within your control to fix.
Group closely-related keywords together, and give each group its own ads and its own landing page. Twenty loosely-related keywords in one group means the ads cannot be specific to any of them — which lowers relevance, raises cost, and reduces results simultaneously.