Exact Match That Is No Longer Exact

The keyword you chose, and its relatives

Exact match used to mean what it said. An ad on the keyword dock repair, in exact match, showed only when someone searched for exactly dock repair.

Careful advertisers built whole accounts on that, choosing each search they wanted to pay for and nothing else.

AdWords has matched close variants of keywords by default since 2012, but until last autumn advertisers could switch that off. Now every exact and phrase keyword includes them.

Most variants are harmless, and some are welcome. A few bring searches nobody chose, from people who were never going to become customers.

What counts as a close variant

• Plurals and singulars: dock and docks.
• Misspellings of the words in the keyword.
• Other forms of the same word, such as floor and flooring.
• Abbreviations and acronyms alongside the full words.
• Accents added or left out.

The third changes meaning most often. Two forms of one word can belong to entirely different searches, and the second may be one you would never have bid on.

Why AdWords made the change

People misspell and pluralise unpredictably, and plenty of searches contain a typo. Google's reasoning is that an advertiser should not need a separate keyword for every version of the same request.

For many accounts that is true. A plumber bidding on water heater repair wants the searcher who types water heater repairs, or misspells heater, just as much.

The change trades control for coverage. The coverage arrives automatically; the control has to be taken back by hand.

Where it goes wrong

A plural can be a different thing altogether: glass and glasses, custom and customs, good and goods.

Another form of a word can be a different activity. A keyword about a product can match a search about using it, learning it or finding a place to do it.

A misspelling of one word can be the correct spelling of another, and phrase match carries the same variants into longer searches.

On a small daily budget, each wrong click costs as much as a good one, and the budget can run out before the right searchers arrive.

The search terms report

The searches that actually triggered your ads are listed in AdWords itself. On the Keywords tab, the Details button opens the search terms report: each search, the keyword it matched, clicks and cost.

The match type column shows which searches came in as close variants of an exact or phrase keyword.

Look at the last month, sorted by cost, highest first. The expensive mistakes are usually near the top, and for a small account the report takes a few minutes to read.

Some searches are too rare to be listed one by one and appear only as a combined total, so the report never shows absolutely everything.

Excluding the wrong variants

An unwanted search goes on the negative keyword list, for the ad group or the whole campaign, so the ads stop showing for it.

Here the change has a catch. Negative keywords do not extend to close variants, so excluding one form of a word does not exclude its plural or its misspellings.

Each unwanted form has to be added separately. Exact match negatives are the most precise; a phrase match negative blocks every search containing the phrase, which can catch more than intended.

A worked example

A dock builder on a lake in the Interior builds and repairs floating docks, boat lifts and shoreline stairs for cabin owners, with a crew of four from April to October.

Its AdWords campaign used exact match keywords such as boat docks and dock repair, chosen to avoid paying for anything else.

Reading the search terms report in March, the owner found clicks from searches for boat docking: people learning to bring a boat alongside, and others looking for somewhere to tie up for the summer.

AdWords had treated docking as another form of dock. Each of those clicks cost as much as one from a cabin owner with a sagging dock.

He added boat docking, docking lessons and moorage as negative keywords, each with its plural and common misspellings, and now reads the report at the start of every month.

Judging a search term

The question for each line is simple: would the person who typed this ever hire you?

Some answers are obvious: searches for free advice, job openings or products you do not carry. Others need a look at what those visitors did after the click: whether they stayed, read a second page or sent an enquiry.

That information sits in Analytics, not in AdWords, which is why the two need to be linked before anyone decides a variant is worth paying for.

A routine, not a cleanup

Variants change with the seasons and with every keyword added, so one tidy-up does not last.

Read the report every few weeks, more often in a busy season. Keep a short list of what was excluded and why, so nobody later removes a negative that was there for a reason.

A new negative keyword can also block good searches by accident, so look at the report again a week or two after adding a batch.

Note the dates of larger changes, so a shift in costs can be traced to the week it started.

The counter-case

For many accounts, close variants mostly catch genuine customers who misspell or use a plural, and the waste is small. Exact match still does most of what it did; the difference is at the edges.

An account that already relies on broad match sees wider matching than this anyway, and has the same report to read for the same reason.

For an account built carefully on exact and phrase keywords, though, read which searches triggered the ads every few weeks and exclude the variants that bring the wrong people.

Every few weeks

1. Open the search terms report for the last month.
2. Sort by cost, highest first.
3. Mark searches no customer of yours would type.
4. Add each as a negative keyword at the right level.
5. Add its plurals and misspellings separately.
6. Keep a list of what you excluded and why.
7. Check enquiries before raising any bid.

Step five is the one this change makes necessary. Your keywords now reach variants automatically, but your negative keywords do not, so every exclusion has to cover its own variants by hand.

Judging what those visitors did after the click is covered in AdWords and Analytics kept in separate boxes.

Frequently asked questions

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