Yahoo search marketing can prove to be a highly profitable means of reaching your target audience in search. Unfortunately, Yahoo’s campaign management interface is relatively unintuitive when compared to that of Google AdWords. To make the most of your PPC campaign, possessing a solid understanding of the tools you’re using is mission critical. That being said, let’s take a look at one of the less-than-intuitive points of the Yahoo tool: match type.

Yahoo offers two match types: Advanced and Standard, with Advanced being the default:

Unlike Google’s rather meaningful match type terminology (Broad, Phrase, Exact), “Advanced” and “Standard” don’t tell us much of anything at first glance. So what do they mean?

Yahoo’s Advanced match type is analogous to Google’s Broach match. Choose Advanced match and your ad will be displayed for variations of your keywords, including:

• Singular/plural variations
• Common misspellings
• Phrases containing your keyword
• Reordered versions of your multi-word keywords

Yahoo’s Standard match type is fairly similar to Google’s Exact match. However, Yahoo Standard will display your ads not just for your exact keywords, but also for singular/plural variations and common misspellings.

Which match type should you use? If you need tight control over what phrases display your ads, use Standard. If you only require loose control, you might try Advanced match + Excluded Words.

That’s Yahoo match types in a nutshell. For more information, check out Yahoo’s reference guide.

Share This Post