Expanded broad match after 3 weeks

Any trends starting to appear?

[seasalt]

It has been about three weeks since expanded broad match changed the rules.

Feel free to add you input based on the questions below.

1. What changes in ROI and sales is being experienced?

2. What actions are being taken to counter any effects of the new broad matching (beyond using negative keywords, etc.)?

3. Any trends starting to appear?

seasalt

[Neil_S]

My opinion is that expanded broad match does not work properly. That's my own experience, and opinion of a number of boards where this is being discussed.

The relevance to search queries has gone way down (wasn't 'relevance' the excuse for this?).

It clearly doesn't work properly from a technical point of view. Try putting in some search phrases where you know your ad should appear. Is it there? Only sometimes. We've just switched a campaign to phrase match, so at least the ad should appear if a key phrase is contained within the query.

No, broad match is an almost total failure, and should be rolled-back as soon as possible.

Neil

[Tropical Island]

We felt the same way in the beginning however over the last 3 or 4 days we are seeing an increase in our CTR and in the results of the tracking system. We don't do direct sales so we track visits to our "money" pages. If people are clicking through to them then we are happy. In the long run many will turn into customers.

We have checked many terms where we feel our ads should be appearing with the broad match and they are now there. We were even surprised to find one where the system appears to have read the copy in our ad and presented us where we had no specific broad match term. Almost like a combination of two seperate terms.

As was stated some weeks back it's a learning process for the system. With us the learning curve is improving. We will continue to track it carefully as we are at the top of our meager budget.