On occasion I get some strange results in Google Adwords, namely, more volume appearing for exact match than broad match and that seems... well... backwards. My understanding is that broad match will include the words in the phrase and any other words in the phrase in any order and that exact match shows the results for the exact phrase shown with the words in the exact same order. What am I missing here? Why the anomaly? How do I handle results like this in a meaningful way when I need to measure search volume? Thanks for reading.
What results like that tell you is that more people search for that particular phrase exactly was written than those that search with other words in the phrase. Also, you have to take the search results from the google keyword tool with a grain of salt. The only way to really find out what the volume for a particular keyword is to test it with a PPC campaign.
Hi Whane, there are two factors that affect your ad being displayed: quality score (relevance) and price. If your receiving more volume on your other keywords your either paying less money for the broad matches or Google finds the broad matches less relevant and thus doesn't display them (or both). Hope this helps
The order Google uses to trigger your ads is exact first, phrase next, broad last. Your bid has nothing to do with it. If you have all three matches on say "red widget", if people type in "red widget", the exact match will trigger. If few use "plastic red widget" types of searches, then it would be normal for your exact to have more impressions. Knowing this can be very valuable in optimizing your campaign.