Google has announced today that they are “improving” exact match and phrase match for us, how very kind (have you sensed the sarcasm yet?!)
As Search Marketing Agencies know, your ad is only shown from a [exact] match keyword when a user searches that exact term. For example [tennis shoes]. Today Google has announced that they will “also show your ad when someone searches for close variants of your exact match and phrase match keyword” It will do the following:
Google claims that this move “ means that you can broaden your reach to customers who search for close variants of your keywords, while still having more precise control over which search terms trigger your ads.”
To untrained eye this sounds like a generous move from Google to give us PPC service suppliers a helping hand, but wait a minute – what about all the adgroups and campaigns that us PPC agencies have painstaking put together for search term plurals and misspellings? This “improvement” will be putting AdWords accounts in serious risk of being diluted. This is a perfect auto tool for the ‘lazy marketeer’ who hasn’t carefully architected the account, splitting out seed keywords into different campaigns and adgroups to improve quality score, CPC and other KPIs
Broad match is a great way of doing some market research, provided it is done in a controlled manner, when this “improvement” is introduced in mid-May this will basically turn [exact] and “phrase” match into a broad match modifier. However, there is some good news! It is possible to opt out (which we will be doing). The frustrating thing is that it is opt out… so we have to go through the laborious task of doing that.. anyway, of course feel free to give it a go, but you have be warned!
If you want to opt out, you can do this by going into your Campaign settings and select do not include close variants
What are your thoughts to Google changing [exact] and “phrase” match into broad match modifier? A move to make our lives easier or just a way to make more money? Let us know your thoughts.
