Google announced this week that they had released a new open beta in the UK and Canadian markets for ‘modified broad’ match.  To me this is good news.  The launch of expanded broad match almost two years ago brought some definite problems for well built conversion-focused campaigns.  Yes, expanded broad match allows Google to capture terms you haven’t considered, but it also had some interesting matches.  We had one example where a brand term in one of our accounts was matching to a very generic head term – blowing out the brand reporting & CPC, & more importantly having our ads show on something we definitely didn’t want to target.

We resolved that by lowering our max CPC significantly, running multiple match types and reviewing negatives, but it does need ongoing careful consideration.

Broad match is fantastic for:

• A new account launch where it enables you to capture terms you may not have considered in your research (as much as we’d all like our research to be all-encompassing, there will always be new ideas in search query reports)
• When running multiple match types to cast a ‘wider net’ on an ongoing basis, as long as search query reports are routinely checked, useful terms included in the account and irrelevant terms added as negatives
• People are typing in longer and longer search terms and it can be next to impossible to include every single combination in your account (more…)