In fact, I've seen keywords with the following symbols treated similarly: Periods, dashes, apostrophes, colons, forward slashes, plus signs, dollar signs, periods, ampersands, # symbol, accents (<-- an unauthorized list, just based on my experience)
So if I havewidgets
widgetin my list, and a user searches for "widget's", my ad won't show?
In my experience, most of the time - the answer to your question is 'yes'. That said, Google does unpredictable synonym matching on a wide variety of queries, so sometimes it does show... usually unhighlighted or something... so I've made the decision to play it safe and submit all such variations.
red-widget takes precedence.
I had my best keyword in without the dash for ages and then added the one with a dash, thinking it would show seperately. but it showed instead of the original, without all the good history, and only made page 2 instead of high page 1.