Today, Google announced some very exciting news. Keyword match types generally make our lives easier, and we are better able to target the traffic with it. But what happens when your keyword is often misspelled? Or when you’re an e-commerce company who has to bid on singular and plural terms? This could get very time consuming. This past weekend at Hero Conf, there was a discussion among many seniors in the paid search industry about the relevance of adding misspelled keywords to your account. For the most part it was agreed that in cases where your search queries are bringing up a lot of misspelled keywords, it’s a good idea to add them. For many of us, this means creating entire ad groups centered around misspellings and bidding differently based on performance. Well, not anymore! Google is on a mission to make every Account Manager’s life easier!
Starting in mid-May, Google will allow searches for phrase and exact match keywords to be extended to it’s misspellings and plurals. So let’s say you have a keyword in your account for “black t-shirt”. Before, when someone would search for “black t-shirts” your ad would not come up, unless you had that particular keyword in the account. Similarly, if someone searched for the keyword “blck t-shirt”, the ad would also not come up. These are the main issues that Google will be able to address with this new update. According to Google, “at least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling”, I would argue it’s even more. Especially with the speed in which most of us type! Google also believes that this new update will likely increase clicks by 3% in certain accounts, with the CPC remaining the same. Google organic results already do this, which leads us to think that maybe organic results and ads will be better aligned together in the coming months.
Google has already been testing this update with some advertisers, and has gotten positive feedback from them about it. But just in case you have your account all figured out and have everything set up to the point where this update would not be beneficial for you, Google gives you the option to opt out. Once these changes are live in May, you can go into the campaign settings and under the “Advance Setting” options, select the Keyword matching options, as shown below:
This will allow you to better control of whether to use this option or not. Let us know how you think this will effect your account! And to read the full post by Google, please visit this link.
