Match Type - Broad (Session-Based) - Let me turn it off!
Ok every week or two I log into Google Adwords and download a search query report - normally do this to find new negative keywords and find new keywords for new ads and landing pages.
Whilst looking through a report for the last month I noticed that a match type which appears is ‘Broad (session-Based)’. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention but I’ve only just noticed this. Anyway it is quite alarming to find that the search phrases users are using for ‘Broad (session based)’ are nothing to do with the keywords I am targeting. Whereas nearly all the search phrases for ‘Broad’ match are relevant they are not relevant for ‘Broad (session based)’.
A solution would be for Adwords to give advertisers the option to disable ‘Broad (session-based)’ however to do this I would need to disable ‘Broad’ match type and I do not want to do this. The problem with ‘Broad (session-based)’ is that it shows adverts from a users previous search, for example if I type ‘holidays’ into Google and my next search is for ‘car rentals’ there is a good chance that due to ‘Broad (session based)’ match type a few ads for the 1st search term (holidays) will still appear in the results for the 2nd search term.
It is a good idea in theory from Google as many users may enter a generic phrase to start with (e.g. tv) before drilling down into more detail so the 2nd phrase maybe ‘lcd tv’ and then maybe a model number ‘32lg2000′ as the user moves along the buying cycle - but Google needs to recognise when search phrases are related and when they are not. Then they can effectively implement ‘Broad (session-based)’ match type.
In the algo for organic results, LSI (Latent semantic indexing) is where Google recognises keywords which are related (e.g. Google knows that both keywords ‘mobile phone’ and ‘nokia’ are be related) and a strict version of this needs to be implemented into the algo for Adwords to stop ads appearing for totally unrelated search terms on ‘Broad (session-based) match types.
A solution for me is to maybe stop ‘broad match’ and go back and see what search phrases generate ‘broad’ match ads and start to move these into ‘phrase’ and ‘exact’ match. Here is some info nearer the bottom of this article from Google on Broad (session-based).
