It’s well known that a good SEO and SEM plan for any online store or blog starts with careful research and selection of the keywords that will kick off a marketing strategy. The many options and combinations offered by Google AdWords (always combined with other search tools) help us keep thorough control of our campaign.
But here’s the news: starting in September, Google will remove the option to “Include plurals, misspellings and other close variants” in keyword Exact Match. Amid alarmist headlines and much debate, we explain the reason behind this change.
Are exact and phrase match going away?
No, but they’re changing and broadening their scope. Until now, with Exact Match, Google AdWords advertisers could bid on specific keywords while avoiding misspelled combinations and plurals which, because of how they’re written, get more or fewer searches. Today we can stop an underwear ad from showing for [braga], whose Google first page is full of results about the Portuguese city, while letting it show for [bragas] (Spanish for panties), with online stores and products ranking on the first pages.
That’s why, always after researching the sector and the competition, many advertisers limited their campaign and budget using exact match.
Of course, Google let us tick the “Include plurals, misspellings and other close variants” box so the ad would appear for various combinations.
According to Google AdWords product manager Jen Huang on the official blog, starting in September this box will be disabled, meaning that even when you set exact keywords, the ad will show for misspellings, abbreviations, plurals or combinations; as long as it doesn’t appear together with a negative keyword. So exact and phrase match are changing to broaden their scope.
Why this change in Google AdWords?
According to the blog, the vast majority of advertisers using exact match also had the box enabled that allowed Google to show their ads when the exact keyword had a typo, was in plural, etc. Add to that the fact that 7% of users make some kind of spelling mistake when typing a search*, and it makes sense to broaden keywords so anyone can find what they’re looking for, whether they spell it correctly or not.
For these reasons, Google is updating exact and phrase match types to make them broader, with plurals permanently enabled.
How does this affect active campaigns?
AdWords account managers will need to focus their efforts on finding negative keywords, that is, all the words that bring poorly qualified traffic to the store. So if we want to keep controlling AdWords campaign spend as before, we’ll need to work thoroughly on the words we don’t want to show up for in searches that are irrelevant or unsuitable for the business model. Basically, because CPCs change when a keyword’s search volume expands or shrinks. If that exact keyword broadens, CPCs are likely to rise as more advertisers can compete for it. It will be crucial to review the campaign in depth so costs don’t skyrocket with the wider market.
In this way, Google wants to trigger ads even when users misspell their searches. This reinforces the search engine’s strategy of focusing on the semantics of what’s being searched (answering the query) and not just on its syntax (how it’s written).
As a result, campaigns may get out of control and show up for keywords that aren’t being monitored. That’s why it will be increasingly essential for an expert to manage your campaigns, develop keyword strategies and, above all, dig in daily to keep control of what Google would like to slip past us.
* Taken from the official Google AdWords blog: http://adwords.blogspot.com.es/
