What’s the difference between broad match, phrase match and exact match? Don’t be afraid to question new advances in the industry and think critically about how they will impact your business in the long term.įorbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies.In my time as a search engine marketing consultant, I’ve found that many overlook phrase match and exact match in their Google AdWords campaigns. Google Ads still has incredible tools that can benefit your marketing efforts, but knowing how and when to use them is more important than anything else. The way around falling into a trap and blowing out budgets is to leverage the tools that are available to you and use them to your advantage, instead of simply enabling automation and handing over control to the platform. While Google claims that these changes will enhance performance and lead to improved campaign control, it’s valid to be wary of the updates. Be careful with your keyword selection, but most importantly, be extremely aggressive with negative keyword selections. For example, if you’re a digital marketing firm, you should understand that anyone searching for consultants probably has a different mindset and isn’t likely to become a client. It’s crucial to analyze your data, understand the nuances of your target market and weed out what falls outside of it. By doing this, you can see the exact ways in which this change has impacted your efforts. Second, track your spending and compare irrelevant search terms to relevant search terms. This is an ongoing optimization tactic that can prevent exposure to irrelevant search terms. Review all exact and phrase match (close variant) search terms. While these are incredibly useful tools that allow advertisers to be more nimble and scale more rapidly, they are also incredibly wasteful if not carefully implemented and controlled.įirst, it’s important to conduct a Google account audit for yourself. A platform cannot inherently differentiate between a good qualified lead and one that is spam or not useful. The push by major platforms like Google and Facebook to use automation and machine learning can be great in some instances, but when it comes to areas that impact qualified leads, for example, the changes can be detrimental. Thus, you would be wasting your click budget on an irrelevant website visitor. But phrase match may also bid on the close variant of “social media consultant,” which often denotes a lower-cost contractor. For example, you may want to bid only on the term “social media agency” in order to attract midsize prospects looking for agency-level expertise. Not to mention your already precious budget will be wasted on keywords that are not as relevant as Google’s algorithm believes them to be. On the other hand, if you’re using specific keywords, you could find that this modification is skyrocketing broader industry searches, resulting in higher spend and a reduced click-through rate. For businesses that are running Google Ads and need to meet specific ROI targets, the increased volume of irrelevant or less-than-relevant queries can obliterate their budgets. In reality, the changes can drastically impact marketing budgets and tank campaigns. We’ll have more control over searches, higher traffic, and it seems easier to expand and manage campaigns. So far, everything discussed may sound like it’s a huge benefit to the industry overall. Who Is Impacted And What Are The Consequences? Ostensibly, this new winning combination of automation layered over broad match keywords has enough intelligence to cover all match types and produce better results than even exact match. The rationale is that there’s no longer any need or advantage to having multiple keywords with different match types. This change also represents a not-so-subtle nudge by Google, gently but directly pushing advertisers to hand over the keys to Smart Bidding. Basically, the idea is to allow marketers to scale campaigns more easily without doing the work to cover every search term in their campaign. As described, they should allow us to no longer worry about multiple match types, as our campaigns can reach more bottom-of-funnel searchers with fewer keywords, by using technology that improves understanding of language and intent. According to Google, these updates work in advertisers’ best interests.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |