Smackdown! reports how bad Google’s broad matching has gotten lately. I’m not sure if he was signed into his Google account at the time, as that can have an affect on seeing pretty unrelated ads, but it still goes to show how Google is making the quality of their search results and traffic worse in favor of trying to increase their profits.
They’ve basically gotten to the point where they’ll just show your ads anywhere in hopes that someone will click on them or possibly more to just inflate CPCs for that search. With each “update” Google has been doing, the costs to advertise on Google go up and their traffic quality goes down which most likely means that they’re showing your ads to people not truly interested in your product or service.
Another effect of Google constantly expanding their matching is your quality score can suffer. Your click through rate still has a huge impact on your quality score, position and CPC. If your keywords show up in less relevant results, your ad most likely won’t get clicked which will slowly decrease your quality score.
What are some simple steps you can take to have more control of your ads on Google?
- Match Types - There are 3, Are You Using Them?
Using different match types keeps your ads from showing up when you don’t want them to. This is a whole topic by itself, but basically if you’re only using broad match, you’re opening yourself up to allow Google Extended Broad Matching to show your ads on a wide variety of untargeted searches. - Turn Off Content - or at Least Keep it Separate from Search
First, make sure to automatically opt out of Content matching when creating a new campaign. Google has probably made millions by automatically opting people into their content network. If you are using content, be sure to create separate campaigns for it.Content is a separate product from search and there are plenty of differences. Keyword matching, tracking, demographics and even user intent are all different. Google tries to lump them together, but you should make sure that you treat them as separate products.
- Turn Off Automatic Matching (if you’ve been opted in)
If anyone has a positive story about Automatic Matching, it’d be great to hear it. To me, it sounds like a pretty bad idea, at least from an advertiser’s point of view. If you’ve ever used the Website content feature within Google’s keyword tool, you’d know that Google is pretty liberal in its keyword suggestions. Do you think their automatic feature would be any better?
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