Match types are not three flavors of the same campaign
By Steven Pope · September 13, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Match types are not three flavors of the same campaign
They are three different jobs
Most accounts have all three doing the same one
Look at your search term report
If the same customer query is winning impressions
Broad
Phrase
Exact at the same time
You are not running a funnel
You are running an auction against yourself
Amazon is happy to charge you for it
Your own campaigns bid up your own CPCs while the data splits across three lines so no single keyword ever gathers enough conversions to optimize on
Budget is the second leak
Broad eats faster than anything else
In the account because reach is the entire point of it
Left uncapped
Discovery spend quietly starves
The campaigns that actually pay you
Give broad a research budget
You would be fine losing
Keep the real money where conversion is proven
Bids should stair step
A keyword earns a higher bid by earning conversions
Not by living in a tighter match type
If your broad bids and exact bids are identical
The funnel has no gravity and nothing ever graduates
Also stop treating negatives
as a cleanup task for irrelevant junk
Negative exact inside your discovery campaigns
Is how you move traffic on purpose
Block the winner upstream
Its conversions consolidate downstream
Where you control the bid
They are spending in one place per keyword
Discovery finds the query
Exact monetizes it
Keep the lanes separate and your ACoS fixes itself