How Should I Interpret "Broad" Searches?

Hi Greg,

It means that If you bid high enough on that keyword, in your AdWords campaigns, you have the potential to have about 40k impressions of your ads in the search network for ads targeting the many keywords triggered by broad match, and 187 impressions of your ad for searches that exactly match that keyword.

That broad match data represents the volume of all the keywords that might trigger your ad using that "broad match" setting for your keyword in your ad campaigns. Of course you would need them to click your ad to get traffic to your website, so your actual visits will depend on your CTR. For example, if your CTR is 3% then you would get approximately 1200 monthly visits to your landing page from ads triggered by the broad match keyword setting and about 5 or 6 visits from searches that exactly match the targeted keyword.

Your CTR will depend a great deal on how compelling your ad text is and how well targeted your keyword is for that ad text. Please note that broad match keywords tend to not be very well targeted and generally have a very low average CTR. In most cases you will want to focus on well chosen exact match keywords, or phrase match keywords with lots of negative match keywords, to prevent irrelevant keywords from triggering your ads. Otherwise your ad budget will be squandered on poor performing keywords.