The idea behind advanced match is you bid on a keyphrase and have your ads show for related terms without you spending the time to manually enter them. Ideally, ads would only show for more specific variations of a keyphrase that is set for advanced match. More specific variations of a keyphrase usually contain the keyphrase itself plus other words.

A good pay per click program would only match a keyphrase plus additional terms when that keyphrase is set to be advanced matched. Neither Adwords nor Yahoo! Search Marketing actually use advanced match (or broad match) in this way. Yahoo! Search Marketing will take a specific phrase and match it with less popular general phrases. For example, if one were bidding on “circuit card assembly” with advanced match, YSM would show the ad for “circuit cards” as well. For an advertiser bidding on “circuit card assembly,” “circuit cards” is too general of a term. Although the advertiser may want an ad to show for “circuit card assembly services,” “circuit card assembly Michigan,” and so on, they may not want an ad to show for “circuit cards.” However, there is no way around this – the advertiser would have to decide whether all the clicks gained from the more specific variations is worth the money lost on the more general variation. YSM does not have negative match for exact phrases. When using broad match, Adwords will show ads for queries that have synonyms or similar terms to a keyphrase being bid on. A keyphrase targeting “shorts” might also show ads for “shirts” because Adwords considers them to be similar enough. An advertiser can overcome this by using negative keyphrases (probably at the ad group level in this particular case).

Pay per click programs always over-match keyphrases when advanced match is used. Adwords provides ways to compensate for this, but YSM has a flaw in their system.