the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

Google has been busy perfecting their automatic billing matching feature the past few months.

While you’re away on Memorial Day travel this weekend, do you mind if we just slip into your account and make some minor adjustments?

We didn’t think you would mind. Have a great weekend!

In all seriousness, this is a fairly controversial feature and should be measured closely.

What to do first:

Turn it off

Opting in and out: Automatic matching is applied at the campaign level. You can opt your campaign in and out of automatic matching on your Campaign Settings page.

Or Leave it on: Do nothing, it’s conveniently already running for you

Should you choose to leave it on, you will want to measure the performance. You can do this via 2 reports:

• Performance statistics: Aggregated performance statistics for automatic matching will appear in each ad group’s Keywords tab, in a line item labeled Automatic Matching Total.
• Search Query Performance report: You can see the search queries that triggered your ads due to automatic matching by running a Search Query Performance report. The queries will be labeled Automatic in the Search Query Match Type column.

Now that I’m thinking of it, this would be a great strategy to try with my clients. While they’re gone this weekend I’ll email them with the great news they’ve been selected for the ‘double management service’ where I increase their billable hours as I see fit (only when it’s relevant, of course). I’ll let you all know on Tuesday how it worked out.

Okay, this is one of those 3-4 day runs where I’m seeing wild conversion rate swings in multiple campaigns. These are campaigns that I know better than my own family.

Mr. Adwords behind the curtain, I know you’re doing something over there with your hog wild broad matching.

Cut it out…

***Update - It appears the Adwords dropped the ball a little bit yesterday, which partially explains what we were all seeing.

Please note that conversion tracking data collected during this brief period may under-report the number of actual conversions achieved.

However, this has been going on longer than 1 day, so I still think there’s something else going on.

Are we all being unwittingly opted into the not-so secret borderline fraudulent unsold inventory firesale Automatic Matching beta?

The latest hysterics from our industry blogoverse is that Google Adwords broadmatching changes are causing advertisers all over the universe to suffer a precipitous drop in ROI. The first post I read on this issue was the only one that actually made any logical sense at all. It was also different from the subsequent posts because it was limited to the implications of expanded broad match on regionally targeted ads. This is a unique issue that requires some creativity to troubleshoot.

The rest of the posts just outline problems that are simply solved by reading your analytics data or log files and implementing a solid cadre of negative keywords. Of course, there are anecdotal stories of ‘this word’ matching to ‘that word’ and oh my god our impressions went through the roof! OMG!

My problem with all of this is the apparent expectation that Google Adwords owes the advertiser a platform that works a certain way. Look, this is an advertising platform. You don’t have to use it. If it changes in it’s performance, either adjust to that change or don’t use it. You can vote with your dollars. Do you hear high level SEO’s whining everytime Google makes a change to the organic algo? Not if they’re any good. You just figure out what is going on and make the adjustment.

In fact, I will go even further and say that 95% of the problems are caused by poorly constructed accounts with loose keyword/adgroup correlation, in addition to underutilized negative keyword filtering.

I absolutely use broad matching on every single account I manage. I also use exact and phrase match. The reason broad match is so attractive is because of the scalability. It’s where you will find your greatest volume, and of course, it requires a lot of work to make sure it’s done at an efficient ROI.

Jeremy at PPCDiscussions has a nice strategy outlined in terms of how he manages his way through a campaign. My approach is different, but also relies on carefully monitored negative keywords at THE ADGROUP LEVEL.

Am I denying that expanded broad match is occuring?

No, of course not. I am as realistic about Google’s motivations as the next guy, but I’m not going blame them for any of my problems managing accounts.

Do I want Google to allow advertsisers to opt out of Expanded Broad Match?

Of course.

I am choosing to use the tools they are giving me to make the best of the situation.

Here’s some advice someone posted on a blog recently that I printed out and put on my wall:

Don’t Complain. Just Work Harder.