Match type doesn’t change which keyword you’re bidding on — it changes how loosely Amazon is allowed to interpret it. Getting this wrong is one of the most common ways a technically “correct” keyword still wastes budget.
Broad Match
Shows your ad whenever a customer’s search contains your keyword’s words, in any order, and can include close variations. It’s the widest net.
Advantage: maximum reach, useful for discovering search terms you wouldn’t have thought to target directly.
Disadvantage: it will also show for genuinely irrelevant searches. Broad match without a regular negative-keyword routine is close to guaranteed wasted spend.
Phrase Match
Shows your ad when a search contains your exact keyword phrase in the exact word order, with other words optionally before or after it. It sits deliberately between Broad and Exact.
Advantage: narrower than Broad, so less irrelevant traffic, while still catching more variations than Exact.
Best for: the middle stage of testing — once Broad has surfaced a term worth taking more seriously, but before it’s proven enough to isolate with its own bid.
Exact Match
Shows your ad only when the search matches your keyword precisely. The narrowest, most controlled option.
Advantage: the most targeted traffic and typically the highest conversion rate, because there’s no ambiguity about intent.
The rule that’s easy to miss: when you move a term to Exact Match in its own campaign, add that same term as a Negative Exact in the campaign it came from. Without that step, both campaigns end up bidding against each other for the same search — driving up your own CPC and splitting performance data across two places instead of one.
Matching match type to the funnel stage
Match type isn’t really a standalone setting — it’s the mechanism behind the Auto → Phrase → Exact funnel: Broad and Auto for discovery, Phrase for validation, Exact for the terms that have already proven they convert and just need a dedicated, well-controlled bid.