Monday 22 September 2008

Expanded Matching – broadening my skepticism

OK, Google’s expanded match has been around for a while now, but is it just me or are things getting worse? Over the last couple of months I’ve seen broadmatched terms increase their impressions by 150-200%. Google seems to dial it up during slow seasons for individual keywords.

For example September is a particularly slow month for selling wrist watches, so why, we have to ask, has the term ‘gold watches’ on broad match received more impressions than it did last month?


It’ll be interesting to see if the keyword tool broad match and exact match volume estimates for affected terms like this reflect the increased expanded matching. Eg, does it show an increase in broad match impressions where there is actually a decrease in exact match impressions? I’ll look into this over the next couple of weeks.

What can we as advertisers do about this?
Make sure list of negative keywords is comprehensive. Google introduced the search query report to help us to identify more negative keywords, but unfortunately as the impression volume goes up you can bet that the number of “other unique queries” goes up too! I’ve not yet come across a third party tool that gives full search query visibility either (several give more visibility, but not total) – if anyone knows of one then please make me aware!






In the mean time here’s a nice little example of expanding matching too far – my ad for the product SnoreWizard was appearing against searches for ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Roy Wood’. Nice.

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