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Phrase Match Ads in Google: Plural vs Singular

First a quick definition of phrase match. Keywords that you select for phrase match are enclosed in {}. A phrase match keyword phrase is a match when the user enters exactly your keyword phrase as part of the search query. So for instance, if you do a phrase match on “used cars”, and the user searches on “toyota used cars”, this is a match since your selected keyword phrase: “used cars” appears in “toyota used cars”. However, if the user had instead searched on “used toyota cars”, then this would not be a match because “used cars” no longer appears as is in the search query - the word toyota is inserted in between “used” and “cars”.

Going with the example above, if the user searched on “used car”, this would no longer qualify as a match because your keyword phrase “used cars” does not appear exactly as a part of the user search query “used car”. On the other hand, let’s say that you instead do the phrase match on “used car”, i.e. the singular form. Now, a match is returned both when the user search query is “used car” and “used cars”, since in both cases your keyword phrase “used car” is part of the user search query.