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 wanted to be sure we were wasting as little impression share as possible.
Another issue I’ve found with ‘exact’ match is that the intent doesn’t even match. For example, ads were showing for the search ‘make payment’ – which is not in any way relevant to what the client offers – and none of the exact match keywords include ‘make’ anywhere.
Overall, I’m finding the time which could be better spent in other areas of optimisation os being eaten up by scouring search term reports (as well as performing manual searches to check ads aren’t being served) on almost a daily basis.
For clients with big budgets, showing ads for irrelevant search terms isn’t as much of an issue, though it is still frustrating that impression share is clearly being wasted. And when the average CPC is more than £10.00, every click counts for clients with smaller ad spend.
I’ve also written about the issues with ‘Other’ search terms appearing more frequently, too, and the impact it has on clients with smaller budgets.
So, what can advertisers do about it?
Make exact match keywords exact again
The only real way around this would be to run a Google Ads script that forces Google to only show ads for the specified match type of the keywords in the account.
I recently came across this fantastic Reddit user, who has created a script with great results, if you want to try it out for yourself.
