The death of broad match (for finance keywords)
Why broad-match-plus-smart-bidding stopped working for regulated finance in late 2024.
Google's standard recommendation through 2023 and into 2024 was 'broad match plus smart bidding' for almost any campaign. For consumer retail and a lot of B2B, that combination genuinely outperformed exact match by surfacing intent the manual keyword list missed. For UK bridging finance in the second half of 2024, it stopped working - decisively.
What broke
Broad match on 'bridging finance' in late 2024 was matching to searches like 'short term loan no credit check', 'fast cash loan uk', and a whole tail of payday-adjacent queries that had nothing to do with property finance. Smart bidding could not unlearn the wrong audience fast enough.
Quality of clicks collapsed. Cost per click stayed flat. Cost per qualified lead roughly doubled across the cohort over six weeks.
Why it worked elsewhere and not here
Broad match relies on Google having enough signal to disambiguate intent within a search. For consumer retail terms with high volume and clean conversion data, that signal is plentiful. For a regulated, low-volume, semantically-overlapping term like 'bridging finance', the signal was too thin.
Smart bidding was confidently wrong, and confidently wrong at scale is more expensive than cautiously right.
What we moved to
Phrase and exact match only on commercial-intent terms, with a long curated negative list, and Performance Max running in parallel for brand-adjacent harvesting. The match-type discipline was the largest single improvement to account performance in Q4 2024.
We have not run broad match on a bridging account since.
Broad match is a fine default. It is not a fine default for regulated finance terms with semantic overlap into consumer credit, where the model cannot tell your prospect from someone looking for a payday loan. That distinction matters enough to override Google's standing advice.
Capital Edge publishes one note a month on UK bridging finance, paid acquisition, and AI-led outbound. Written for brokers, by the team running the playbook.