On August 28, UK SEM firm TopRankdigital reported that in September 2014, Google will remove exact and phrase match keywords from the match types available to Adwords users.
According to the article by TopRankDigital’s Wesley Parker, exact type match will not completely vanish from marketers’ match type tool kit: “While the exact match keyword type will still exist, close variant matching will be applied, meaning that your keyword will also trigger for close variations, including misspellings, singular and plural forms, acronyms, stemmings, abbreviations, and accents.”
According to Didit’s Kevin Lee, who contributed to the article with experts Larry Kim, Matt Umbro, Brad Geddes, Andrew lolk, Jeff Ferguson, James Svoboda, and Perry Marshall, “power users of AdWords such as the Didit team and sophisticated advertisers with larger budgets will be more likely to feel the impact of the changes in match type.”
Who will be affected by the removal of exact and phrase match keywords? According to Kevin, “Some customers of larger advertisers are doing nuanced searches with very specific intent with sufficient frequency to justify exact/phrase match in its purest form. We understand Google’s intent in thinking that their algorithm knows best and agree that a simpler set of match types will benefit the large majority of advertisers. However, some of us will be sad to see the old style exact and phrase match control disappear. Use of negative matching will allow us to regain some of that control, but not all.”
Google isn’t the only search engine rolling out Close Variant Matching. According to Search Engine Watch, Bing is testing this matching system right now, suggesting that it’s the wave of the future. As Kevin Lee notes, “Variant enabled matching is also well suited for the next generations of search and display including voice, contextual and video context (transcript) targeted ads.”
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