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Keyword Match Types in Yahoo! aren’t as self-explanatory as Google’s, and unfortunately, they don’t offer much choice and control either.

There are only two keyword match types in Yahoo!: Advanced & Standard. Here are examples of each match type from Yahoo!:

Standard Match Type

For example, if you advertise on the keyword “plasma television,” your ad may be displayed for the following search queries:

• plasma television (same)
• plasma televisions (singular/plural variations)
• plamsa televisions (common misspellings)

But in addition to the above examples, your ads will also be triggered by search queries such as:

• how is plasma television (preposition, auxiliary verbs, etc)
• television plasma (rearranged phrase)

Advanced Match Type

For example, if you advertise on the keyword “plasma television,” your ad may be displayed for the following search queries:

• plasma television (same)
• plasma televisions (singular/plural variations)
• plamsa televisions (common misspellings)
• buy a plasma television (in a phrase)
• plasma or flat panel television (separated by word(s))
• television with a plasma screen (in a different order)
• flat panel screen (sub-phrase query)
• plasma (general/broad query)
• 42-inch plasma television (specific query term)
• ‘Brand A’ plasma television (specific query term)

From first glance, using Advanced Match seems like a good idea since most keyword variations will be covered and most of them appear to be decently relevant. But imagine this:

According to the examples given by Yahoo!, the keyword “plasma television” can be trigger by the search query of either “plasma” or “television” with Advanced Match Type (general/broad query). Assuming you are only selling plasma television and having the search query “television” triggering your ads is just too costly and inefficient. The only way to prevent the search query “television” from triggering your ads is to have “television” as an Excluded Word (there is no different keyword match type for Excluded Word).

The downside to this is now when someone searches for “buy a plasma television”, your ads won’t get triggered because your Excluded Word “television” is preventing your ads from showing. The Excluded Word “television” will prevent any search queries that has the word “television” in them from triggering your ads, unless the search query is “plasma television”, which is the exact match to the keyword you are advertising.

Does Advanced Match Type still look attractive to you?

Now, get this. A keyword phrase such as “buy plasma television online” in Advanced Match will be triggered by search queries like “i like television” or “television rating”. I know this because I regularly request search query report from my YSM account manager (unfortunately, Yahoo! doesn’t allow advertisers to output search query report by themselves as Google does in AdWords, at this moment), and I’ve seen a lot of ridiculously off-topic search queries that were triggering our ads.

At this point, Advanced Match Type in Yahoo! is just TOO BROAD to provide any significant benefit.

The logical conclusion would be to only use Standard Match keywords in Yahoo!, and that’s what I would suggest, too.

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