One trade I make on every single account, without exception.
By Michael Erickson Facchin · July 28, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
One trade I make on every single account, without exception.
Early in my career, I thought broad match was something to avoid - the "messy" setting, the one that felt out of control, the one senior marketers warned you about. Turn it on and you'll bleed budget on irrelevant clicks, they said. Keep everything tight, keep everything exact, keep everything predictable.
It took me years to realize that advice was only half right. Broad match isn't dangerous because it's loose. It's dangerous when nobody's watching it.
Here's the trade I make on every account I run, and have made for years: I give up a few weeks of what looks like chaos: broad match campaigns casting a wide net, picking up search terms that seem random, sometimes even a little embarrassing on the surface. In exchange, I get something no amount of guessing or competitor research could ever hand me: the exact words real customers type into the search bar before they hand over their money.
"Red Nike Elites." "Zipper shoes." "Blue Air Jordans." "Art running shoes." Nobody sits in a strategy meeting and invents phrases like that. Customers do. And broad match is the only setting that lets them tell you, in their own language, unprompted, exactly what's on their mind before they buy.
Most people look at a search terms report full of loose broad match data and see noise. I've trained myself, and every team I've built, to see it differently: it's the cheapest, most honest research tool available in PPC, and it's sitting right there in an account most people never bother to open.
The mistake isn't running broad match. The mistake is running it and never coming back to look. Left alone, it does bleed money that part of the old advice was true. But watched closely, harvested weekly, with the winners promoted into tight exact match campaigns and the noise cut ruthlessly that same "messy" data becomes the clearest signal you'll ever get about what your customers actually want.
So that's the trade I keep making, account after account, year after year. A little short-term mess, in exchange for the truth about what people are really searching for. I'll take that trade every single time.