Google Adwords “Automatic Matching” Feature
Google Adwords is testing a feature called “Automatic Matching.” In essense it will automatically spend your budget for you by extending your reach to keywords that you aren’t already bidding on if Google deems it appropriate.
This makes me incredibly nervous. As one of my colleagues said ‘It’s bad enough they have your health information now their spending your money too’.
When I build out campaigns here I spend a solid amount of time on keyword research as well as various combinations of keywords and phrases so I feel confident that I’m hitting all the valuable searches. With an implementation of something like this, whats the point of taking the time to do broad, phrase and exact match. Doesn’t this sound like an iteration of broad match which is beyond our control?
Here’s the example from Google:
I’m excited to tell you that you have been selected to participate in a beta for our new Automatic Matching feature which will be starting on February 28th.
Automatic Matching automatically extends your campaign’s reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists. By analyzing the structure and content of your website and AdWords campaigns, we deliver more impressions and clicks while maintaining your current CTRs and CPCs.
For example, If you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic Matching would automatically crawl your landing page and target your campaigns to queries such as: “shoes” “adidas” “athletic”, etc., and less obvious ones such as “slippers” that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion on your site.
Be assured that automatic matching will try to never exceed your budget. If you’re already meeting your daily budgets, automatic matching will have a minimal effect on your account.
Shoes vs. Slippers? Yikes!
How am I applying that principle personally? Well we have a real estate site which currently doesn’t offer rentals, only real estate for sale. Basically is Google saying because my keyword list doesn’t offer rentals that they will bid on that for me? Houses for Sale and Houses for Rent may be similar but certainly those two keywords are not targeting the same searcher. It sounds kind of like Google’s keyword tool that searches for synonyms and suggests adding those to your keyword lists only done in an automatic fashion now.
I like Google, their products, and the people that we work with there, but I really don’t see the value in this.
I just hope that Google is careful when testing this, or the perceived value of PPC ads and the amount of people clicking on them might decline faster than the amount of people who are still buying cd’s.
This is good in terms of google. Naught looks to annoy towards it compared to this!