I don't use content/placements at this moment in time. And I've currently turned off Search Partners too - so I'm only advertising on the Google Network. It's what converts best for me, so until I have money to burn I'm sticking to what works and spending more on it. I would definately split search and content/placements as they are 2 different ball games. What works for search is different to what works for content. I'm hoping/waiting that Google will allow a campaign to be Google Partners only - as opposed to Google + Search Partners. Then you can have a campaign for Google and a campaign for the search partners. At the moment the only way is having Campaign A (Google) and Campaign B (Google + Google Search Partners), which isn't exactly great is it. Adwords is mainly correct account structure + testing. If you do those 2 correctly, you won't go far wrong. Fortunately, not many people do both correctly.
I totally agree with all the reasons for splitting match types, but I'm gonna have to disagree with you on the point above. I currently manage some very large accounts which I have inherited form an old manager. One of the first things I did was start splitting the match types down, and what I can tell from my own research / experience is that exact doesn't always override broad, and all the other combinations you mentioned. To give an example: I had an account with a broad, phrase and exact match variant for a KW. I split these around 3 months ago (so plenty of time to adjust QS / bids / position etc), and have included negative matches of the exact KWs in the broad match campaign. The results are that conversions have increased for my exact match KWs and dropped for my broad match KWs - this bearing in mind that their avg. positions are the same as they used to be - I believe this is because some of the conversions I used to get for these exact match phrases in the broad match variants no longer apply.
Honestly, Exact does overide Phrase/Broad and Phrase overides Broad. Reading your final paragraph I'm not sure what that has to do with what match type overides others. Conversions go up and down for a whole host of different reasons. Because they dropped on broad, has nothing to do with overiding match types. I've ran accounts for a long time and never seen anything to suggest what I said above is incorrect. Sometimes, I think a broad matched keyword has been incorrectly triggered, when it should have been the exact - but then after logging into my account realised it's because my budget on the Exact campaign has run out for that day - so the broad keyword kicked in, instead. Going back to conversion - broad match conversions are pretty much usless anyway. If a broad matched keyword is getting conversions - then you need to find out what these keywords are and make sure they are in your account as Exact and Phrase matches. Broad matches serve 1 purpose and 1 purpose only (for me) ... to help you find more long tailed keywords. The Exact (and sometimes Phrase) is the business end of Adwords.. this is what you should be spending most of your budget on and tweaking things accordingly.
Hey Muchaco, Totally agree with your second point, that's usually my M.O. too, (if you have a look through some of my previous posts I hope you'll think that like yourself I'm one of the people on here who does know what they're talking about - I'm genuinely good with Adwords on lots of levels, although I'm always open to new options and learning more). I guess I should explain my point more, and obviously if you can explain where my thinking's wrong then I'll be happy to take that on board. The purpose of this one was essentially to test whether the phrase is always triggered by the exact match or the broad etc. Experiment: I inherited an account with many campaigns / ad groups - each of the ad groups had a number of phrases in them, every phrase in broad, phrase and exact. I split the phrases down from ad group A into 3 different campaigns, and the pertinent results here were: before splitting: on average Exact made up 34.49% of conversions for any given KW, Broad made up 65.51% of conversions for any given KW - this was a 3 month average across around 16000 clicks I then took the broad and exacts into their own campaign and put the exact phrases in as negatives into the broad campaign after splitting: on average exact made up 40.63% of conversions for any given KW, Broad made up 59.37% of conversions for any given KW - once again a 3 month average across around 16000 clicks Now, I'm not measuring conversion rates here, which would be expected to go up and down, but what percentage of the total conversions are made up by each match type. What I'm thinking is this change in percentage is down to broad getting triggered less as the exact is triggered more (the percentage of clicks for each match type also matches this change)
If I'm understanding you correctly, the better way to see whether Broad was triggered less, would be to look at impressions/clicks as opposed to Conversions (Like you say conversions can be sporadic and as you split them up, if you have different Ads in these new adgroups, this could also make a difference to whether the keyword converted or not). For example, before the split take the number of impressions and clicks for Broad match over the 3 months, and then do the same again for the 3 months after the split. If any keywords were added to the account then this won't work. I've never put all negatives into my Broad/Phrase matched campaigns and as I add ?kw={keyword} at the end of the destination URL in the Broad/Phrase campaigns, I know if they are being triggered instead of Exact Match. The only time this has happened is, like mentioned before, when the Exact Campaign has run it's daily budget (so Broad or Phrase kicks in as their budget hasn't run out), or because the keyword/phrase that was searched by the user, was not in my account as an Exact match. In other words, there's always been an explanation as to why Broad or Phrase was triggered instead of Exact. Does this make sense? Like I say, Broad matched keywords only serve one purpose to me and that's to find new Exact keywords. As I find out these new Exact keywords and add negatives to broad (to prevent long tail keywords that don't relate to my business from being shown) the number of Broad match (and in most cases Phrase) impressions goes down. Ultimately, you want no broad match impressions and all business to be going through your Exact matched keywords and sometimes Phrase as they are more targeted.
I always get a bit confused with the broad, phrase and match listings in adwords. Trying to ensure just one sets of keywords gets picked up can be so tricky and you have to pre-think how the keywords and ads will apear across your campaigns. If you get it right though, it can really help increase your click through and potentially conversions.
I'd recommend you avoid the broad term as the CPC and CTR will be really low and it could also cost you a lot of money