Matt Holland, head of PPC, agenda21
Google’s latest innovation for PPC advertisers is coming soon as they are offering new match types for advertisers. The new match types will be ‘near exact‘ and ‘near phrase‘ match types which will be in addition to the Broad, Broad Match Modified, Phrase and Exact match types.
From the 14th November Google will be running this new beta test match types that will slightly broaden the reach of Exact and Phrase match keywords with syntactic variants including; plurals, misspells, acronyms and abbreviations but not synonyms. The idea being that this will be for advertisers who wish to increase their coverage and volume on Exact and Phrase match keywords and help them find incremental traffic with minimum effort.
Personally, I look forward to these match types from Google as it will be easier for advertisers to extend the reach of keywords without having to build out massive keyword lists whilst still maintaining a level of control that is not offered when using Broad match on keywords. However, advertisers still need to be wary of how they use these match types on high traffic generic terms. For example if you now Near Exact match on the term ‘credit card’ you will also show for the term ‘credit cards’ which as can be seen below receives 110,000 searches a month in the UK where as ‘credit card’ received 22,000 local monthly searches according to Google’s Traffic Estimator.
However, this is the desired effect that Google would be looking for, as by introudcing these new match types it will increase Google’s revenues from PPC advertisers in two ways:
1. Advertisers will now expand their reach on to new keywords increasing the amount of auctions that an advertiser is enter in too.
2. Advertisers being introduced to these new auctions (due to the increase in reach from their keywords) the existing advertisers who were on these keywords (such as credit cards) will see more competition come in to that auction which will result in an increase in CPC’s.
It remains to be seen as to whether these match types will be an option that you can negative match by, which would allow advertisers further control over their keywords and the auctions that they enter into but we will let you know more about this if/when we find out more.
If you have any questions/comments about this latest innovation from Google, please get in touch with us. We’d like to hear your comments as to why you think Google have called these match types ‘near exact’ and ‘near phrase’ rather than exact/phrase match modified?
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