Creating new Google Ads search campaigns takes a lot of time and resources.
Keyword research is a huge part of this. However, the amount of work invested into completing it, compared to the results achieved, is more than slightly disheartening, in part, due to the complete lack of control we now have over supposed ‘exact match’ keywords.
This is nothing new – exact match hasn’t meant exact for a while now. But Google is certainly pushing its luck (and trying my patience) when it comes to the search terms it will show ads (and waste impression share) on.
What is the point of exact match keywords?
For one of our clients, we carefully looked back through years of historical data to identify the best-performing keywords, as well as building new campaigns targeting new products and services.
The business is relatively, but not overly niche, and so with a solid cross-campaign and cross-ad group negative keyword strategy in place, we launched the campaigns fairly confident that the exact match keywords we were targeting had very little wiggle room to show ads for anything it shouldn’t be.
Except, we were wrong.
In the example below, I was conducting research on a competitor of the client. I was not expecting to see that an ad was eligible to show for this competitor’s brand name, despite it not being a keyword in the campaign, or any other campaign in the account, for that matter.
The more competitor research I did, the more brands were ‘eligible’ for an ad to show. I then had to spend time looking at the brands that triggered an ad, and built a list to be added as negative keywords. Frustratingly, some of them were not even what I’d consider to be direct competitors, but I