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Google Is Killing Off Exact And Phrase Match Keywords. Who Will Be Affected? | DrivingSales News

Google Is Killing Off Exact And Phrase Match Keywords. Who Will Be Affected?

August 19, 2014 0 Comments

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Most advertisers are now aware that Google is killing off exact and phrase match in AdWords as they are currently known. While this has been the default since 2012, what Google is doing now is removing the option for advertisers to opt out. Google explains that the vast majority of advertisers are already using it, writing that “close keyword variations [receive] an average of 7 percent more exact and phrase match clicks with comparable click-through and conversion rates.”

Google says that most advertisers won’t see a difference in their account given the already very high rate of adoption, and this is true based on the estimate that only 3 percent of advertisers had opted out and were using exact and phrase match, and therefore they are the only ones who will be affected.

There was a downside for those who used phrase and exact match, as the increased control and ROI came at a cost of dramatically increased account management complexity. For example, an account with 10 million keywords would typically have consisted of approximately 1 million core keywords and 9 million variations of those same keywords. This resulted in many times more account artifacts, which in turn created account inertia that made it more difficult to be agile in other ways. For example, ad copy and landing page optimization was much harder because there were so many more groups to deal with.

Close Variant Keywords can be advantageous, as they allow advertisers to expand their reach by tapping into long tail searches that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to get due to their low search volume.

Some marketers are wondering why Google would get rid of exact and phrase match. While match types made a lot of sense 15 years ago, we are now living in an age of keywordless ads. It is said that phrase, broad, and modified broad match types have become blurred together, making the differences between them less dramatic than they used to be, and Google’s ability to infer search query intent has improved in the last 15 years since the introduction of exact match. Conversely, there are other useful places to focus attention that can produce far greater results, such as finding unicorn ads and landing pages that can provide improvements of as much as three to five times in ROI.

Google’s change does take some control away from advertisers, but there are other places to concentrate campaigns that can have more impact and can lead to bigger changes. Instead of focusing on repetitive, time-consuming keyword expansion tasks, advertisers can focus on SEM strategies.

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The DrivingSales News team is dedicated to breaking the relevant and the tough stories affecting car dealers. Have questions for DrivingSales News? Reach the team at news@drivingsales.com.

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