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In Google AdWords there was a time when “exact” meant exact. A few days ago, Google announced a change in the way exact match works in AdWords keywords.
Since when Google AdWords started its successful “career”, people try to reach its potential customers. However, finding the right keywords to reach them can be pretty difficult. As Google says, “Whether someone is searching for “running shoes” or “shoes for running,” what they want remains the same; they’re looking for running shoes.” So, which kind of keywords’ list should you have to build?
Close Variants: the keyword to your success!
Close variants (plurals, typos, abbreviations, adverbs and so on) helps you connect with people who are looking for your business.
Google introduced close variants in 2012: in this way, each AdWords’ user could capture plurals, misspellings, typos and other versions of exact match and phrase match keywords by building just one keywords’ list. Now, to let you reach more customers, Google’s going to expand close variant matching by including variations in word order and function words. As Google reports “advertisers may see up to 3% more exact match clicks on average while maintaining comparable clickthrough and conversion rates.”
Let’s see what changes.
Function words
Function Words are prepositions (in,to), conjunctions (for, but), articles (a, the) and other words that don’t impact the purpose of the query. From now on, Google will ignore function words but only when it won’t change the meaning of the keyword.
For example, the “in” in “parks in san diego” can be safely ignored ’cause it doesn’t change the meaning of the search. However, the “to” in “flights to san diego” wouldn’t be ignored because “flights from san diego” doesn’t mean the same as “flights to san diego”.
Word Order
Considering that users often don’t use natural word order when searching on Google, with this change exact match will use the same logic to match with queries that are reordered variations of the keywords you use.
For example, “buy new shoes” and “new shoes buy.” Please note that:
- word reordering won’t add any word to the keywords you are using for your add;
- keywords won’t be reordered to match with a query when the reordering changes the original meaning of those keywords.
What’s the result of this change?
With this important change, Adwords users won’t have to build keywords’ lists full of reworded or reordered keywords. In short, things are getting easier. Obviously, phrase match keywords aren’t included in this update.
