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Google recently announced they were doing away with exact match AdWords ad targeting this September. They will force all match types to have close variant keyword matching enabled. This means you get misspelled searches, plural versus singular overlap, and an undoing of your tight organization.

In some cases the user intent is different between singular and plural versions of a keyword. A singular version search might be looking to buy a single widget, whereas a plural search might be a user wanting to compare different options in the marketplace. In some cases people are looking for different product classes depending on word form:

For example, if you sell spectacles, the difference between users searching on ‘glass’ vs. ‘glasses’ might mean you are getting users seeing your ad interested in a building material, rather than an aid to reading.

Where segmenting improved the user experience, boosted conversion rates, made management easier, and improved margins - those benefits are now off the table.

CPC isn't the primary issue. Profit margins are what matter. Once you lose the ability to segment you lose the ability to manage your margins. And this auctioneer is known to bid in their own auctions, have random large price spikes, and not give refunds when they are wrong.

An offline analogy for this loss of segmentation ... you go to a gas station to get a bottle of water. After grabbing your water and handing the cashier a $20, they give you $3.27 back along with a six pack you didn't want and didn't ask for.

Why does a person misspell a keyword? Some common reasons include:

  • they are new to the market & don't know it well
  • they are distracted
  • they are using a mobile device or something which makes it hard to input their search query (and those same input issues make it harder to perform other conversion-oriented actions)
  • their primary language is a different language
  • they are looking for something else

In any of those cases, the typical average value of the expressed intent is usually going to be less than a person who correctly spelled the keyword.

Even if spelling errors were intentional and cultural, the ability to segment that and cater the landing page to match disappears. Or if the spelling error was a cue to send people to an introductory page earlier in the conversion funnel, that option is no more.

In many accounts the loss of the granular control won't cause too big of a difference. But some advertiser accounts in competitive markets will become less profitable and more expensive to manage:

No one who's in the know has more than about 5-10 total keywords in any one adgroup because they're using broad match modified, which eliminated the need for "excessive keyword lists" a long time ago. Now you're going to have to spend your time creating excessive negative keyword lists with possibly millions upon millions of variations so you can still show up for exactly what you want and nothing else.

You might not know which end of the spectrum your account is on until disaster strikes:

I added negatives to my list for 3 months before finally giving up opting out of close variants. What they viewed as a close variant was not even in the ballpark of what I sell. There have been petitions before that have gotten Google to reverse bad decisions in the past. We need to make that happen again.

Brad Geddes has held many AdWords seminars for Google. What does he think of this news?

In this particular account, close variations have much lower conversion rates and much higher CPAs than their actual match type.
...
Variation match isn’t always bad, there are times it can be good to use variation match. However, there was choice.
...
Loss of control is never good. Mobile control was lost with Enhanced Campaigns, and now you’re losing control over your match types. This will further erode your ability to control costs and conversions within AdWords.

A monopoly restricting choice to enhance their own bottom line. It isn't the first time they've done that, and it won't be the last.

Have an enhanced weekend!

Published: August 16, 2014 by Aaron Wall in google

Comments

Andrew
August 17, 2014 - 10:19pm

It's hard NOT to be cynical about this move by Google. What possible benefit can taking away an option (primarily used by Adwords "power users") benefit anyone? Surely if you gave someone options A, B and C and you GENUINELY thought A was the best choice out of the 3, you could simply advertise and recommend that option more than B and C. Given that it's the more discerning Adwords user that uses exact-match, why take away their choice?

More realistically, I feel the need to state the obvious: of course, Google are the only party to benefit from this move, and that's why they've done it.

Every major change Google makes is to benefit Google, but they pretend they do it for the benefit of others. And this is all because they failed to come up with any serious revenue stream outside of Adwords.

Perhaps it's timely that in the same month Google will make this change, Julian Assange's book on Google (When Google Met WikiLeaks) will be released.

February 19, 2015 - 1:16am

RKG looked at the relative conversion rates of the traffic sources & found close variant match converted at a far lower rate than true exact match traffic:

including the match type column in Google’s search term report allows advertisers to view performance of true exact and phrase match traffic versus CVM traffic. If Google conversion tracking has been set up, advertisers will be able to compare conversion rates as well.

Across a sample of RKG clients, we see that close variant exact match search terms see a conversion rate of just 48% that of true exact match search terms, while close variant phrase match conversion rate was 86% that of true phrase match. These differences in conversion rate exist for both branded and non-brand keywords.

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