It wasn’t very long ago at all that we were talking about the ‘slightly broad match’ concept, but it appears to have been a winner and Google has just announced that it is rolling out the feature acoss most languages globally.
As a general rule, we stay clear of broad match in our PPC campaigns, but it would appear that the new option is proving to be a success and ‘one major UK retailer’ is reporting it to be a big hit.
Anyone who has any experience of managing adwords accounts will be familiar with the different matching options (broad, phrase and exact) and be aware of the various strengths and weaknesses of each strategy – the broad match modifier does address the issue of broad often being far too broad, but it is still unlikely to be as successful as carefully managed phrase / exact match keywords with a healthy splattering of negative keywords.
Where we do believe that this will help is to overcome the dreaded ‘search volume too low’ issue (an old soap box moment of ours…). Where Google believes that there are very low search volumes, it can often be next to impossible to actually target specific keywords with phrase or exact match options and you are forced into using broad match.
We always welcome new innovation from Google and it is good to see that this one has been embraced, although we do not believe it is ground breaking.
