Find out the fundamentals behind Google Ads keyword prioritization and a breakdown of what Google’s prioritization rules mean for small business advertisers.
Have you ever looked at your search terms report and thought, “What the heck is that search doing in that campaign?”
Or have you seen a previously top-performing search campaign virtually stop spending when you launch Performance Max?
Google recently updated and clarified what it calls keyword and search theme prioritization and if you haven’t yet seen the delightfully confusing chart we’ll cover below, don’t worry. I’m going to break it down for you right now, clear and simple, plus share what it means for your Google Ads account.
Keyword prioritization is how Google chooses which of your ads to show when a user searches for something that’s relevant to your business.
Remember, there are a whole bunch of different ways that your search and Performance Max ads can matched to user queries, including:
For simplicity’s sake, the rest of this article will simply say “keywords” to refer to any of the ways you become eligible to show ads on Google Search: keywords, search themes, dynamic ad targets, or AI-matching.
Keyword matching, using keyword match types, is a system that figures out whether or not you’re eligible to show an ad on a user’s search.
Because of how keyword matching works, it’s common to have multiple keywords in your account that can match with the same query. However, you can only show one search ad at a time.
For example, let’s say a user searches for “led lightbulbs.” That could match to:
How will Google determine which campaign “wins” and shows an ad?
That’s where keyword prioritization comes in. When multiple ads are eligible to match to a user’s query, an elaborate AI-powered keyword prioritization occurs to determine which campaign, ad group, keyword, and ad are “put forward” into the auction, to compete for that user’s click.
🔍 Optimize your keyword list to align with your business’s priorities using our Free Keyword Tool.
Here are the five pillars of Google Ads keyword prioritization.
If you have an eligible exact match keyword identical to the user’s query, it will be prioritized and enter the auction above any other keywords. Think of this like “old school” exact match still winning the day.
Remember, the definition of exact match today is that the user’s query must match the intent or meaning of your keyword. For example, if you have the keyword [google ads tool], and the user searches for “AdWords tool,” that would be considered an exact match (close variant), since “google ads” and “adwords” are synonyms. According to keyword matching rules, you would be eligible to show an ad.
But from a prioritization perspective, “google ads” and “Adwords” do not exactly match—they are not identical. So, your [google ads tool] keyword would not automatically move forward to the auction, especially if you have a keyword like “adwords tool” or even “google ads tool” elsewhere in your account.
It’s clear that “google ads tool” and “adwords tool” are not identical. But what about “google ads tool” and “google ads tools,” the singular versus plural? Or, “google ads tool” versus a 1-letter misspelling, such as “gogle ads tool.”
While synonyms, misspellings, and plural iterations of keywords can all “match” to exact match keywords, they are treated differently when we’re talking about keyword prioritization.
And what if we’re evaluating “google ads” versus “google ad,” which could be considered a synonym, misspelling, or plural? Who knows!
I’m serious. The best piece of advice I can give you to wrap your head around keyword prioritization rules is to think of them as a helpful guide when planning your campaign structure, but acknowledge that no matter what, this will all be a bit fuzzy in practice.
Now that we understand that exact match keywords get top priority when the keyword is identical to the user’s search, what happens when you don’t have an identical exact match keyword?
Google Ads will look for a phrase match keyword, a broad match keyword, or a Performance Max search theme that is identical to the user’s search.
When we say “identical,” the same rules apply as above: the actual letters and words of your keyword/search themes exactly match what the user typed, including misspellings, not including synonyms or plurals.
For example, if the user searches for “google ads tool,” and you have the keywords in your account [google ads] and “google ads tol,” and the Performance Max search theme “google ads tool,” the phrase match misspelled keyword “google ads tol” and the Performance Max search theme “google ads tool” would be prioritized. The exact match non-identical keyword [google ads] is not an option for this auction.
In this example, which ad would move forward to the Google Ads auction: the search ad with the misspelled phrase match keyword, or the Performance Max ad with the identical search theme?
When you have multiple keywords or search themes at the same prioritization level, the one with the highest ad rank will move forward to the auction.
What’s ad rank, again? The simplified answer for our purposes right now is that ad rank is a calculation of your bids and your Quality Score. The higher your bids, the higher your ad rank, and the more likely you are to enter the auction (and, hopefully, win the auction). The higher the quality of your ads, the more likely you are to enter and win the auction as well.
Therefore, when multiple campaigns in your account are eligible to show an ad and sit at the same prioritization level, the one with the higher ad rank will move forward to the auction and compete to show your ad.
You can’t talk about new Google Ads features anymore without talking about AI, so let’s dig into how artificial intelligence powers keyword prioritization today.
Let’s be honest: although we’ve spent a lot of time discussing what happens with identical matches, the most likely scenario in your account is going to be that the user’s search is not identical to an existing keyword or search theme. This means it could match to many of your keywords, search themes, and dynamic ad targets.
Enter AI. AI-based keyword prioritization will look at every eligible kind of targeting in your account, including:
and choose the most relevant ones to be considered in the auction.
“Relevant” doesn’t mean “how identical it is to the keyword.” Relevant also doesn’t mean ad relevance, the component of Quality Score that looks at the relationship between the user’s search and your ad.
For AI-based keyword prioritization, relevance looks at the meaning of the user’s search, all the keywords in an ad group, and the landing pages within the ad group. From there, machine learning would figure out which ad is most likely to entice that user’s click.
🚨 Get ideas to optimize your account’s keyword lists and more with our free Google Ads Grader!
Full disclosure: we are now shifting from Google Ads facts to Jyll Saskin Gales’ opinions. There are many potential implications of Google’s keyword prioritization rules. Here are three I’d like you to consider:
First, you have less control than you think over what searches you advertise on. Those that embrace automation with a consolidated campaign structure, providing sufficient budget and data integration to power Google’s AI, will see better results over the long term than those that attempt to cling to control. Sure, you could respond to this news by adding thousands of exact match keywords to your account and manually bidding, but you will spend all your time battling negatives and fiddling with bid adjustments, fighting the machine rather than getting the machine working for you. That doesn’t sound like fun or success to me.
Second, Dynamic Search Ads are shafted in prioritization. For the record, they are also shafted in the search campaign setup process. You can’t create a dynamic ad group in the current Search campaign setup process; you can only add one after the campaign has been created with a standard ad group. Given this and the fact that the search component of Performance Max is already powered by DSAs, I predict that dynamic ad groups will be “upgraded” to Performance Max soon. If you’re an advertiser who leverages a lot of DSAs, you may want to start testing alternate strategies, like broad-match keywords with responsive search ads.
Third, ad rank is still one of the most important factors in Google Ads success. While factors like auction competition, user context, and ad assets all matter too, it’s important to remember that you have the most control over are still your bids and your Quality Score to improve your ad rank regardless of the queries you match with. That’s the funny thing about Google Ads—as much as features and tools change over time, the fundamentals, like Quality Score and bid strategy, still remain the same.
It can be easy to only focus on your keyword match type mix without considering how Google Ads keyword prioritization can also impact what queries your ads match with. Be sure to save the walkthrough above when you need to quickly predict how your core keywords could align with potential searches (and include it in your Google Ads audits). For more help making the most out of your Google Ads keywords, see how our solutions can maximize your Google Ads campaign success.
