Don’t worry, the title is suppose to be ‘ironic’.
Yesterday Google AdWords announced they are going to start matching keywords to typos, plurals, or variations.
I have discussed before about keyword research. Adding variations, looking at what Google Search Instant suggests, adding misspellings – without DKI adverts of course, don’t want your user base thinking you can’t spell! Or further endorsing their misspellings of course.
Well, this is all changing from May. The system is now going to be set to allow for this. No longer will it only broad match *cough* to relevant keywords – spelt correctly, it will now allow for misspelling matches without you having to add these as keywords. Why? Cynical reasoning, more exposure for AdWords and more revenue for Google, ensures they aren’t losing any click costs from not matching to searches with decent user intent but a suspected typo.
But of course, as a positive – increase in your search traffic. Google stat that 7% of searches are misspellings so this should increase exposure – and impression share. Initial beta testing suggests a 3% increase in traffic. This practice will probably also help on mobile traffic, typing on the run or allowing for the ‘damn autocorrect’ principle.
This should also, help quality scores. By not having to add variations and misspellings to your account to ensure you are present for those keywords, you won’t be including keywords which aren’t in your advert and aren’t on your landing page.
But, if you are slightly dubious what Google will match your keywords too, anyone who has run an extensive search report must have seen a few dodgy matches, you can turn it off.
Go to the campaign, click on Settings, Advanced Settings, Keyword matching options – ‘Do not include close variants’ or ‘Include plurals, misspellings and other close variants’ – emphasis there on the close.
I like the idea but am untrusting on the quality of the matches. By having a campaign on broad match you can usually identify misspellings, so it seems to me the system is already slightly set up to accommodate typos. I will be testing this matching behaviour but watching it pretty closely.
As soon as I see ‘waterproof sun block’ matching to ‘wather shun brick’ I’m outta there. Try and remember, Google are great but they are a business you are paying. Never set your PPC on and leave it.
