Today in Digital Marketing’s Post

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Jill, I have been reading a ton about this new broad match default setting. What is happening here? What is happening is that when you set up a new search campaign in Google Ads, there is among the many settings you can choose from this little box called Broad Match Keywords. And that box has been there for some time. And if you turn Broad match keywords on, then Google will ignore all the match types of your keywords in that campaign and set everything to broad match. And if you have the setting off, Google will respect your match types. And so until recently the default was off and you could use match types as you please. But now if you go to set up a new. Search campaign. The default is that this broad match keyword setting is turned on. And so practically what that means is if you just kind of zoom by and don't notice, you go add in your keywords and phrase match or exact match, once you hit save, Google's going to remove your match types and unless you see the very small writing, not tell you about it. And in the future, if you go to add keywords to that campaign, even if you add them with phrase or exact match types, the moment you hit save, Google just strips out your match types. This sounds like a bad idea. Is it, am I reading this wrong? I mean, for Google, it's probably a very good idea. I joked that for my business, it's a good idea. But yeah, this is, I don't think this is a very good idea. I see a lot of confusion happening because of course, you know, most people who use Google ads, they're not experts. They're trying to follow some tutorial as they go through to set up their campaigns. And if they even notice that their match types are disappearing, they will probably have no idea why, especially if you go to start working on existing campaign and you don't think to check this. Anything the campaign settings, you could want to bash your head against the wall to try to figure out why you keep typing in your match types and they keep not showing up. It's important to note that no changes are made to existing campaigns. So if you have existing search campaigns with your match types, those who work as intended. But if someone turns on this setting accidentally or on purpose in an existing campaign, or when you go to set up a new campaign, this could really impact the kinds of searches you're eligible to show on. Because of course, broad match means you're eligible to show on. Any user search that is related to the idea of your keyword versus something like exact match, which means you can show on searches that at least share the same meaning as your keyword. You know, we've seen all the platforms sort of broaden out targeting Google. I think it's been one of the more aggressive at that, especially with Performance Max when it first launched. They've kind of tightened things up a little bit here and there, but this kind of sounds like another move toward just opening it up and then I guess the theory. Inside Google is that the AI will then kind of sort it out? Is this just trying to collect more data for machine learning? It is. And it's also, you know, Google really wants us to use broad match. Does it make Google more money? Sure. But when I try to put on my hat of like, OK, you know, other than making more money, like what might be the impact here? What might be the good in this? There are some potential good reasons to use broad match. One of them is that broad match incorporates more signals than exact or phrase match. For example, it will use the context of your website and other keywords in the age group to help figure out what search is to serve on and and exact and phrase. Don't do that kind of like how when you use a smart bidding strategy, right AI, it incorporates a lot more signals than a manual bidding strategy. There's also relatively new features called broad match inclusions where you can actually use broad match keywords to just advertise on your brand name, something you couldn't do before. So there are potential benefits, of course, to using broad match and if you're a large budget levels, I'd absolutely recommend broad match. But this setting, even for me who's, you know, very Google supporter and. After I'm gone, Google, kool-aid. Still, it feels a bit aggressive towards new advertisers who aren't going to know what they aren't going to know and might be shocked to find out what they end up advertising on. Yeah. Because I think there's sort of a common feeling among people who are not in it that often that while you go in and you type, you know, if you sell shoes, you have a list of 10 keywords, inexpensive shoes, fashion shoes, cheap shoes. Can you kind of put your head in, in the, put your brain as if you were an advertiser 10 years ago, Google advertiser 10 years ago. And the Google advertiser today and compare the different versions of broad match that we have between those between the last decade and this decade. Is today's broad match any smarter than broad match was 10 years ago? Absolutely. It's smarter than it was two years ago. You know, as much as we like to say, ohh, we want our control bag, we don't wanna go so broad like it's absolutely is a better product than it used to be. What I would say is the way exact match works today is probably the way broad match worked five years ago. So things are getting broader. But I will also give Google credit that on the negative keyword side, negative keywords are also getting broader. So before if you wanted to exclude people searching for, I don't know, Adidas, you would have to also include every possible misspelling of Adidas. Is if you just excluded Adidas and someone writes note Adidas or Adisa, you could still show an ad. Now negative keywords are going to start excluding misspellings as well. So it's not just in the positive that Google is broadening things. Also something like negative keywords, Google is broadening things. But this is really just yet another March towards a fundamental shift in the way keywords work. You know, Google Ads is no longer a game of picking the exact kind of searches you want to show up on and showing ads. It's much more about picking general ideas. Themes and audiences and letting machine learning do the rest Yeah, there was a whole industry around it. I mean people got, you know, practically got PHD's in keyword planner just to kind of move around the thing they were courses and and white papers galore around how to and services. I mean dozens and dozens of SAS products that would help you pick just the right keywords with broad match. Can you tell me remind me a bit about the reporting, you know, can we see what what keywords are performing and then maybe, you know, say, well look when they did broad match it found. At least 10, and they're really crappy, so I'm just gonna negative those out. Do we have that level of transparency? You do have that level of transparency with a big caveat. You have your search terms report, but in your search terms report, you may see a lot of search terms are not visible. They get bucketed under other search terms. We spoke about this a few weeks ago, and so Google has made advances there as well. It used to be that you would only see something in your search term report if you got at least one click on that search. Now you just need to have impressions on that search. You can start to see all these searches which you were showing for and didn't get clicks for, and those can potentially be helpful things to add as negatives. And then recently, just last week, Google also announced that misspellings can start to show up in the search terms report as well. Because before a misspelling would be such low search volume that you wouldn't see it. Now you are going to be able to see it. So you can't see everything you're advertising on, whether using broad phrase or exact match keywords, but you can see more in your search terms report today than you could two years ago. All right, good stuff. Thanks, Jill. Thank you. Jill's asking GAIL, says our Google Ads correspondent. She's here every second Wednesday. You can learn more about her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link at Today in digital.com/GA. And you can watch our full unedited interview. There's a link to it in Today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to TODAY in digital.com/newsletter.