Amazon PPC Broad vs Phrase vs Exact Match Types (2026)

A few months ago, a kitchen-gadget seller named Marcus walked into a 1-on-1 review with his ad spend bleeding. He had a single Sponsored Products campaign with 80 keywords. Every single keyword was set to broad match. His ACoS was 62%. His TACoS was climbing. He was spending $4,300 a month and watching his margins evaporate.

The problem was not his bids. It was not his listing. It was not even his product. The problem was that broad match was showing his “stainless steel garlic press” ad to people searching for “garlic seeds,” “press release,” and “stainless steel sink.” Every irrelevant click cost him $0.70 to $1.20 with no chance of a sale.

We restructured his account around proper match type usage. Inside three weeks, his ACoS dropped to 28%, his ad-attributed sales went up 19%, and his wasted spend on irrelevant search terms fell by more than 60%. The fix was not magic. It was just understanding what Amazon's three keyword match types actually do, and using each one for what it is good at.

Match types are the most misunderstood part of Amazon PPC. Sellers either ignore them or pick one and run everything through it, and both approaches leak money. This guide explains how broad, phrase and exact match work on Amazon today, which searches each one does and doesn't match, how negative and product targeting match types work, what to bid on each, and how to combine all three.

Updated October 16, 2026. Now with a broad vs phrase vs exact comparison table, example searches that do and don't match each type, Amazon's current rules for negative keywords and broad match modifiers, auto and product targeting match types, and a worked bid example per match type.

What Are Amazon PPC Match Types?

A match type tells Amazon how closely a shopper's search has to match your keyword before your ad is allowed to show. You choose one for every keyword you add to a manual campaign. Sponsored Products offers three keyword match types: broad, phrase and exact.

Each one trades reach for relevance. Broad match gives the most reach, exact match the most control, and phrase match sits in between. None of them is as literal as the name suggests, though. According to Amazon's help page on keyword match types, all three account for plurals, misspellings and translations, and exact match can even show your ad for a close variation, such as “outdoor lights” when your keyword is “outside lights.”

Match types apply to keyword targeting in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Automatic campaigns use four targeting groups instead, and product targeting has its own exact and expanded options; both are covered below. Keywords can also trigger ads on product pages and in other placements, where Amazon infers a search term from the context.

If you are still getting comfortable with how Amazon advertising works overall, start with our beginner's guide to Amazon PPC, then come back here.

Amazon Broad vs Phrase vs Exact Match: Comparison Table

Match rules and bid order are from Amazon's help page and its Sponsored Products targeting guide. The bid percentages are a common rule of thumb, not Amazon guidance; the bidding section below shows how to work out your own.

Which Searches Match? An Example With “Running Shoes”

“Possible” means Amazon decides: broad match picks synonyms and related terms based on the meaning of your keyword and the product you advertise, so these searches can match but are not guaranteed to. Your search term report shows what actually happened.

Amazon PPC Broad Match: Maximum Reach, Minimum Control

Broad match is the loosest match type. Amazon describes it as matching searches that contain your keyword's words in any order, plus singulars, plurals, variations, synonyms and related terms, judged by the meaning of the keyword and the context of your product. The keyword itself doesn't even have to appear in the search. Amazon's own example: the broad keyword “sneakers” can match “canvas sneakers,” “basketball shoes,” “athletic shoes,” “cleats,” “trainers” or “foam runners.”

When Broad Match Wins

Broad match is your discovery tool: it surfaces search terms you would never have thought of yourself, which you then mine for the gems. It works best when:

• You are launching a new product and need to find which search terms convert before you commit budget to specific keywords.
• You are running a discovery campaign built to harvest new keywords for your phrase and exact campaigns.
• Your keyword is already long and specific, such as “slow feeder dog bowl for large breeds,” so broad match has less room to drift.

Broad Match Risks

The same flexibility makes broad match dangerous. Without negative keywords, it will show your ad on searches that have little to do with your product, sometimes connected only by one shared word. Short keywords and words with two meanings are the usual culprits:

• A “yoga mat” broad keyword shows on “yoga teacher training,” “yoga clothes,” and “mat board for picture frames.”
• A “wireless headphones” broad keyword shows on “wireless charger,” “headphone jack adapter,” and “Bluetooth speaker.”
• A “garlic press” broad keyword shows on “garlic powder,” “press conference,” and “stainless steel sink.”

Bid lower on broad than on phrase or exact; Amazon's own recommendation is to put the lowest bid on broad. Broad drives more impressions but lower-quality clicks, so you need a lower cost per click to make the volume pay.

Phrase Match on Amazon: The Useful Middle Ground

Phrase match shows your ad when your keyword appears in the search as a sequence of words, with other words allowed before or after it. Close variations such as plurals, misspellings, acronyms and translations count too. Amazon's example: the phrase keyword “curtain rod” can trigger your ad for “extra long curtain rods” or “curtain rods for bedroom.” Change the word order (“shoes for running” for the keyword “running shoes”) or use a synonym (“trail runners”) and phrase match no longer applies.

Phrase match preserves intent better than broad. A shopper typing “running shoes for flat feet” is clearly looking for running shoes, just with a specific need. Phrase match captures that variation and leaves out the loosely related searches broad match would pick up. Use it when:

• You have validated keywords that convert and want their long-tail variations.
• Your category has predictable search modifiers (sizes, colors, use cases, materials) that get appended to root keywords.
• You want more reach than exact without paying for broad match noise.

Phrase match is not bulletproof. It checks that your words appear in order, not that the shopper means what you mean: “iPhone case” as a phrase keyword can trigger on “iPhone case removal tool.” Short phrases of one or two words are the most exposed, so phrase campaigns need negatives too, just fewer than broad ones.

Exact Match: Maximum Control, Maximum Conversion

Exact match is the tightest match type: the search has to use the same words in the same order as your keyword. Close variations still count. Amazon includes plurals, misspellings, acronyms and translations, and its help page gives “outside lights” matching “outdoor lights” as an example. Keywords are not case-sensitive. An exact keyword “running shoes” will not show on “men's running shoes” or “best running shoes.”

That tight constraint is a feature, not a bug. Use exact match for:

• Proven keywords with strong conversion history. Once a search term has shown it converts, lock it down in exact match and bid to win the placement.
• Branded terms. Searches for your brand name, alone or with a product type, usually convert well. Own that traffic so competitors don't take it.
• Expensive keywords. If a single irrelevant click would erase your margin on three sales, exact match is your protection.

The tradeoff is reach: if a shopper types a variation you did not anticipate, you miss the impression. That is why exact works best inside a combined structure. Bid most aggressively here. Amazon's targeting guide notes that exact match tends to produce the highest conversion rates, and these are keywords you have already seen convert.

Amazon PPC Broad vs Phrase: Which Should You Use?

Exact is the easy decision: it is for terms you have proven. The harder choice is broad vs phrase. Broad finds searches you would never think of; phrase keeps your core phrase intact and gives you variations of a search you already understand. A practical way to decide:

In most accounts the answer is both, in separate campaigns: broad for discovery at the lowest bids, phrase for validated terms. Amazon's targeting guide recommends testing different match types for at least one to two weeks before pausing any keywords.

Negative Keyword Match Types: Negative Phrase vs Negative Exact

Negative keywords stop your ads from showing on searches you don't want. In Sponsored Products they come in two match types only:

A few rules from Amazon's negative targeting help page and targeting guide that trip sellers up:

• There is no negative broad in Sponsored Products. A one-word negative phrase (“powder”) is the closest thing and blocks every search containing that word, so use it carefully
• You can't change the match type of an existing negative keyword; add a new one instead
• Negatives are not instant. Amazon lists a buffer of 72 hours for negative keywords and 96 hours for negative products before they take effect
• Judge before you block. Amazon recommends evaluating a search term after at least 20 clicks, using phrase or exact for negatives, and letting new negatives run for two weeks or more before changing strategy again
• Product pages need negative product targets (ASINs or brands), not negative keywords

For the full process of finding and organizing negatives, see our Amazon negative keywords guide.

Broad Match Modifier on Amazon: Does It Still Exist?

Many sellers learn PPC on Google first, and older guides mix the two platforms up. On Google Ads, broad match modifier (BMM) is gone: Google began folding BMM into phrase match in February 2021, and since July 2021 you can't create new keywords with the +keyword notation.

On Amazon, the modifier still exists, but only in Sponsored Brands. Putting a plus sign in front of a word makes it required: Amazon's example is the broad keyword “+kids shoes,” which can match “kids sneakers” or “running shoes for kids” but never “sneakers” or “running shoes,” because “kids” is missing.

Sponsored Products has no broad match modifier. When a seller asked on the Seller Forums why it was gone, an Amazon staff member replied that modifiers are a Sponsored Brands feature and that Sponsored Products broad match has instead been expanded with semantic matching. If you want “broad, but this word must be in the search,” use phrase match built around that word, or broad match with negative phrase keywords for the meanings you don't want.

Match Types in Sponsored Brands

Sponsored Brands uses the same three match types, but they match more loosely. Amazon says Sponsored Brands keyword targeting uses semantic matching: your ad can show on searches with the same meaning or intent as your keyword, even when the wording differs. Amazon's own example for the keyword “outside curtain rod”:

Source: Amazon Ads help, Understand targeting. In practice, a Sponsored Brands keyword reaches further than the same match type in Sponsored Products, so check its search term report just as often. Our Sponsored Brands guide covers the rest of the setup.

Product Targeting and Auto Targeting Match Types

Automatic campaigns and product targeting have their own “match types,” and they spend just as much budget as keywords.

Automatic Targeting: Close Match, Loose Match, Substitutes, Complements

In an automatic campaign, Amazon chooses the searches and product pages, using four targeting groups instead of match types. Amazon's examples for a product called “Doppler 400-count Cotton Sheets”:

You can set a separate bid for each group or switch a group off. As a rule of thumb, bid loose match lower than close match, for the same reason you bid broad below phrase. Amazon suggests letting an automatic campaign run for about two weeks before you build manual campaigns from its search terms. Our auto vs manual campaigns guide explains how to run both side by side.

Product Targeting: Exact vs Expanded

When you target an individual product (ASIN), you choose between two options. Exact makes your ad eligible on that product's detail page. Expanded also reaches a limited number of closely related products that Amazon picks from past shopper interactions and views, and updates daily. According to Amazon's product targeting help page, Expanded is the default and its box is selected automatically during setup, so many sellers use it without noticing.

Expanded targets show up in your reports with a “Product-expanded” prefix. Treat them like broad match: promote the products that convert into their own exact ASIN targets, and exclude the ones that don't with negative product targeting. Category targets have no expanded option, but you can refine them by brand, price range, star rating and Prime shipping eligibility. Our ASIN targeting guide goes deeper.

The Keyword Waterfall: How to Combine All Three Match Types

Smart Amazon sellers do not pick one match type. They use all three in a structured pipeline that we call the keyword waterfall:

1. Discovery tier (auto + broad): An auto campaign and a broad match campaign run with low bids. They are not built to be wildly profitable; they are built to find new search terms.
2. Validation tier (phrase): Search terms that convert in the discovery tier become phrase keywords in a separate campaign, where they are tested with tighter constraints.
3. Performance tier (exact): Terms that keep converting at an acceptable ACoS move to exact match in a third campaign, where you bid most aggressively.
4. Negative loop: Every promoted term becomes a negative exact in the broader tiers, and terms that never convert become negatives where they appeared, so discovery stops re-spending on queries you already own or have ruled out.

The negatives each campaign needs:

Amazon says you won't bid against yourself by adding the same keyword in several match types. The cross-negatives still matter: they make each search term land in exactly one campaign, so your data stays readable and your bids stay in control. More in our guide to PPC cannibalization.

Amazon's Target Promotion feature suggests search terms to move from auto to manual campaigns, but you still review and apply them. See our keyword harvesting guide for the routine and our Amazon PPC campaign structure guide for the campaign build.

Example: Reading a Search Term Report by Match Type

Here is what one week of the waterfall looks like for a garlic press seller (illustrative numbers):

In this example, the waste sits in the broad rows and the most orders come from the exact row, which is exactly why the tiers get different bids. Our search term report guide shows how to pull and filter the report.

Bid Ratios by Match Type

Amazon's targeting guide recommends the highest bid on exact, a lower one on phrase and the lowest on broad. There is a mechanical reason too: if several of your keywords match the same search, Amazon uses the match type with the highest bid. Bid broad above exact and your broad keyword takes searches your exact keyword was meant to control.

A common starting framework: exact at 100% of your target bid, phrase at 75–90% of the exact bid, broad at 50–70%. These ratios are starting points, not rules. The bid that actually hits your target ACoS for each match type comes from its own conversion rate:

Target bid = average order value × conversion rate × target ACoS

Worked example: a $30 product with a 25% target ACoS. For phrase match, take Ad Badger's 2026 all-category average conversion rate of 11.1% from its users' data, and assume exact converts at 14% and broad at 8%:

Check the phrase row: at $0.83 a click and an 11.1% conversion rate, each order costs about $7.48 in clicks, a 24.9% ACoS on a $30 sale. The ratios land inside the rule-of-thumb ranges because they come from the same math. Once each match type has one to two weeks of its own data, use your real conversion rates. Our free ACoS calculator gives you the break-even and target ACoS to plug in, and our Amazon PPC bid strategy guide covers placements and dynamic bidding on top.

A Real Example: How a Pet Supplies Seller Used Match Types

A pet supplies seller named Priya was selling a slow-feeder dog bowl. She had been running a single broad match campaign with the keyword “slow feeder dog bowl” and 14 related broad match keywords. Her ACoS was 41% and she was tired of pulling search term reports every weekend to add negatives.

We rebuilt her campaigns into a three-tier structure:

• Discovery campaign: 1 auto campaign and 1 broad match campaign, both running with 50% of her old bids. Daily budget of $25 each.
• Phrase campaign: Empty at first. Built up over the following four weeks with phrase match keywords harvested from the discovery campaigns.
• Exact campaign: Empty at first. Built up over six to eight weeks with exact match keywords promoted from the phrase campaign.

By week four, the discovery campaigns had surfaced 23 new search terms she had never considered. Eleven of them converted. Those eleven became phrase match keywords with bids set to 80% of the calculated target bid.

By week eight, six phrase match keywords had earned their way to exact match. Those exact match keywords ended up driving 58% of her total ad sales at a 19% ACoS. Her overall account ACoS dropped from 41% to 24%, and her total ad-attributed sales were up 32% on roughly the same total spend.

The match type structure did the heavy lifting. The keyword discovery happened on the cheap broad match campaigns. The high-margin sales happened on the focused exact match campaign. Each tier did its job, and the waterfall kept feeding new winners up the chain.

Common Match Type Mistakes to Avoid

• Running everything in broad match with no negatives. Broad match will always find a way to spend on irrelevant queries. If you use it, you need a routine for adding negatives.
• Using identical bids across all match types. Equal bids overpay for broad clicks, and a broad bid above your exact bid lets broad take over searches you meant exact to control.
• Mixing match types in the same ad group. Your reports get muddy and you cannot tell which match type drives conversions and which one eats budget.
• Forgetting the negative loop. A term that converts in broad belongs in your phrase or exact campaign and as a negative exact in the broad one.
• Starting unproven keywords in exact at high bids. Exact match does not make a keyword convert. Validate it through broad and phrase first, then promote.
• Assuming exact means exact. Misspellings, plurals and acronyms still match. If one of them doesn't convert, block it with a negative exact.
• Ignoring expanded product targeting. The Expanded box is on by default. Review the “Product-expanded” rows like you review broad match search terms.

Should You Automate Match Type Management?

By hand, this structure is manageable for one or two products. Beyond that, the workload compounds: every converting term has to be promoted and negated upstream, every dead term needs a negative in the right campaign, and bids per match type need to move as conversion data shifts. Amazon's tools suggest terms to promote, but negatives are still added by hand or with a third-party tool. Daniks.AI automates this routine: you set a target ACoS per marketplace, and its AI creates its own campaigns and runs bids, keyword harvesting and negatives 24/7, without touching the campaigns you already run.

Frequently Asked Questions About Amazon PPC Match Types

What is the difference between broad, phrase and exact match on Amazon?

Broad match shows your ad on searches with your keyword's words in any order, plus synonyms and related terms. Phrase match requires your keyword as a phrase in the same order, with words allowed before or after. Exact match requires the same words in the same order. All three also match plurals, misspellings and translations.

Does Amazon exact match include plurals and misspellings?

Yes. Amazon's exact match covers close variations such as plurals, misspellings, acronyms and translations, and keywords are not case-sensitive. If a specific variant doesn't convert for you, block it with a negative exact keyword.

Can I use the same keyword in broad, phrase and exact match?

Yes, and Amazon recommends testing all three with different bids. You won't bid against yourself: when several of your match types match a search, Amazon uses the one with the highest bid. Keep each match type in its own campaign so each search term lands in one place.

Is there a broad match modifier in Amazon PPC?

Only in Sponsored Brands, where a plus sign before a word (“+kids shoes”) makes that word required. Sponsored Products has no broad match modifier, and Google Ads retired its own version in 2021. In Sponsored Products, use phrase match or broad match with negatives instead.

Can I change a keyword's match type on Amazon?

No. Add the keyword again with the new match type and pause the old one, so its history stays easy to compare. Negative keywords work the same way.

Which match type should I start with for a new product?

Start with an automatic campaign and a broad match campaign at modest bids to collect search terms. Amazon suggests running automatic targeting for about two weeks before building manual campaigns. Then move terms that convert into phrase and exact, and judge each term only after about 20 clicks.

Final Word on Amazon PPC Match Types

Match types are the structural skeleton of a healthy Sponsored Products account. Each one does one job well: broad match finds new keywords, phrase match validates them, and exact match exploits the winners at scale, while the negative loop stops wasted spend before it happens. Build the waterfall, bid highest on exact, and review auto and expanded product targets with the same care as broad keywords. Your match type structure deserves more than the “set everything to broad” approach many sellers default to.