Sorry if this is long winded... I'm at my wits end. We have a budget around 20,000 a year for adwords and I've been given the job of managing the account. I've been studying night and day for a few weeks. They had just a slew (thousands) of genral keyowrds in there before I narrowed them down and they had a CPC limit of 2.50. Hardly any individual CPC for keywords, but a few they had 20.00. They recived about 40-60,000 a year in business, which is not that great. I researched keywords for this very saturated industry and found about 20 for each ad group (6 ad groups focused on different terms for the service) that had less compitition and were more spacific. I gave each word a bid based on a mix of market samuri and Googles sudgestions ranging from 1.00 - 6.00. My problem is, I don't know wheather to make these "Borad" [exsact} or the other one.. sorry if I got the puncuation wrong, but you know what I mean. market samurai predicts allot higher click rate for top place with my keywords, and I don't know if I did this part wrong. Clicks have gone down drastacly, but it looks like they are staying on the site longer.... But, no deals yet, and geting nervous.
Use all 3 - broad, exact and phrase. However, be aware that broad match is very broad - you're using it for research mostly - to see what keywords/phrases that you didn't already have in your campaign are bringing results and adding those - and just as important - which are bringing clicks but no sales, and adding those as negatives.