Bye Bye Exact Match Keywords

Our Reaction to Google's Changes to Exact Match Terms

Author: Philip Hankinson

Google recently announced that they are changing the way exact match & phrase match keywords behave, over the next few weeks advertisers can expect to see any exact match & phrase match terms behaving like modified broad match terms.

It is claimed by Google that this move will be of benefit to advertisers, if you are running campaigns that do not currently contain any modified broad terms you can expect to see impressions, clicks & ultimately costs increasing very shortly.

Exact match keywords used to only be triggered by search queries exactly matching that keyword, here is Google's' old definitions of the keyword matching options…

Here are the anticipated new definitions:
 

What can advertisers do to prevent this new scheme affecting them?

Google have been letting customers know about these changes via the following alert that can be found upon logging into your account:

As I wanted to learn more about these changes I clicked onto the learn more link & read through the entire document without seeing a single mention of "opting out" I find this very frustrating as advertisers should be asked to opt in to these changes & should at least be clearly told how to opt out prior to such changes taking effect.

In order to opt out of this scheme you must go to the settings of each campaign; there you will find the option to opt out hidden within the advanced settings.

If your account does not have an extensive list of keywords you may feel that the new matching options may be of benefit, if this is the case we strongly suggest that you regularly go into your campaigns & with the keywords tab selected use the "see all search terms" option to begin optimising these variations.

Prior to the modified broad term being introduced we constantly found very obscure & very irrelevant search queries triggering our clients' ads.

If you would like a free appraisal of your campaigns by one of our senior Adwords Professionals or need any further advice on this subject or anything else relating to your Adwords account please get in touch on 0845 123 2908.