Google has recently announced that as of late September, anyone who uses their AdWords program will lose the ability to target exact match searches only. From that point on, marketers will be required to also target close variants of the keywords they are interested in. This, of course, is upsetting many marketers who rely on very specific keywords to bring in the traffic that they have found converts the best.
While many marketers have enjoyed taking advantage of typing in just one keyword or key phrase for their campaigns and letting Google find and display their ads to all closely related terms, many others don’t. As we all know, marketing is a very precise art form and for many of us even small changes like this can cost thousands of dollars.
There are many examples of how this change will affect marketers who currently opt out of the close variants. One thing that ‘close variants’ covers is spelling differences. If you choose to opt out of the close variants and you are marketing for the keyword “golf clubs,” your ad would not be displayed for searches like “gol fclubs” or “gulf clubs.”
In addition to close spelling issues, which most marketers would likely want included, this change will also display an ad for terms that are very close in meaning. While I don’t have access to the AdWords algorithm, an example that would seem to make sense would be if someone typed in “golfing clubs.” Marketers promoting golf clubs may not want their ad dollars spent to bring in people who type in “golfing clubs” because they may have found that these searches don’t convert well.
According to Google, this will no longer be an option.
Google and some others are arguing that this will benefit marketers since they will get more traffic to their site. The fact is, however, that more traffic is not always better. A smaller amount of extremely targeted traffic will outperform a large amount of less targeted traffic every time.
A cynic might look at this change and assume it is just Google trying to get more ads displayed on more searches so they can improve their profit margins.
