Plurals - I don't get it

Yes, no maybe so

[limitup]

I've read and been told conflicting information regarding plurals. What's worse is that I'm experiencing the discrepancies in my account first hand. For example:

buy widget
buy widgets

Do I need to bid on both, or just one?

I have some live listings in my account right now that trigger my ad regardless of the "s" at the end, and some that don't. This makes no sense to me?

[limitup]

As an example, on this page it specifically says that with broad match it will match both singular and plural:

What are keyword matching options?
[adwords.google.com...]

However on this page, and in other places, Google recommends having separate listings for singular and plural.

What are the steps to creating a keyword list?
[adwords.google.com...]

As I said, what's worse is that I'm seeing no consistency with my own account - some broad match terms are being matched with both singluar and plural versions of the term, but some are not. So what's the deal here?

[running scared]

Broad match is not always as broad as you think! If you don't get good CTR on the broad match variations then adwords may disable all or parts of the broad match. Worse still they don't tell you!

So yes, use singular and plurals

[eWhisper]

Google measures a whole lot of things in their algo, sometimes its good - other times it's not.

However, often plurals have very different CTRs - and it seems that in these cases, Google doesn't broadmatch plurals - when the CTRs are fairly similar, it seems to match them (there are some other variables, such as plurals which aren't similar: strategy & strategies).

Going a little further into the 'why' of CTRs vary with plurals, often it's directly to user intent.

These are, of course, very general reasons, often when you drill down into the specific keyword - there will be more variation of user intent.

When someone is searching for a 'widget' - they are often looking for one product.

When someone is searching for 'widgets', the intent could be a wholesale buy, a bulk purchase buy, or the user wanting more than one of the item for a number of reasons.

In the same manner, an ad can have a much different CTR & user response if it's in plural or singular form. I've seen that single letter 's' on the end of a product completely change a campaign's dynamics.

[limitup]

Very good info thank you. I wonder why Google doesn't make this type of thing available to advertisers. Anyway, in my case adding an s to most of my terms doesn't change any of the terms the way it could in some cases, so I guess I'll go ahead and make sure I have singular and plural form of every keyword.