Phrase Match About to Get Worse

Update to the matching behavior of phrase and broad match modified

[werty]

Google is going to make Phrase match worse for most of us and of course spin it like we are getting a new feature. Good for shareholders, bad for advertisers.

You may want to audit your accounts and keep an even more watchful eye on your search queries and negative list.

More info - [support.google.com...]

Hello,

Today we announced an update to the matching behavior of phrase and broad match modified (BMM) keywords. You’re receiving this message because you are using at least one of these match types in your Google Ads account (Customer ID: XXX).

What's changing
Starting on February 18th, phrase and BMM keywords will begin to match the same user searches. With this updated matching behavior, ads may show on searches that include the same or more specific meaning as your keyword. This can lead to an increase in traffic on any phrase match keywords and a slight decrease in traffic on any BMM keywords.
To simplify keyword match types, this new phrase match will fully replace BMM by July. Your existing BMM keywords will continue to work, and you can use phrase match keywords for new keywords you would have previously added as BMM.

You don’t need to take any action to benefit from these updates. For more information on the new behavior, including how it will roll out to different languages and best practices, read our announcement post.

Sincerely,
The Google Ads team

[RhinoFish]

When they combine them, and they work the same, the new functionality is not Phrase or Mod Broad, it's in between, it's actually closer to BMM.
It's confusing that they will call it Phrase Match still.

I suggest Phrase + Broad = Phr + oad = Phroad. Oops, wait... :-)

[Silicon]

Just got this email. Really what this means is Google can just leach more money from your account whenever they feel like it. You could watch your negative list, but from my experience Google can attach the most absurd and irrelevant keywords to any broad match keyword, so you are infinitely adding negative keywords, and they are infinitely making money from irrelevant searches.

Yay Google!

[2clean]

At some point in the future this house of cards will come tumbling down. My hope is for contagion of the Australian affair regarding search. Google will be hurting at the moment, even with the changes to GA4 they are basically saying "we're going to guess that our campaigns are delivering value and you, Digital Agencies, need to go and sell that to your clients".

Will this latest pulling of the carpet out from our feet actually be damaging? Probably not for brand advertising which traditionally has a short time to conversion window, but it's in audience discovery campaigns where Google seems to lack the vision of these impacts. Here, top of funnel campaigns, traditionally take a longer time to convert and noise now present in the tracking environment whether through ad-blockers or the general awareness raising in the public domain vis-a-vis invisible tracking (exploited years online while an ethical framework could have been created - karma will bit you - combined with a solution idea that AI (another current dead promise conveniently promoted due to the appeal it has for shareholders that a robot and not humans can manage and make your stocks money is really really appealing) is the future - when in fact as Philip Dick in the early 80s write with Autofaq, it can actually have some negative outcomes for humanity.

Combined with this latest Google Ads changes means that on broad you're likely to only be able to optimise campaigns post-click looking back on keywords in a campaign (now with the caveat that unless there is significant search volume these clicks are not considered to be worth removing due to wasting the time of the "poor digital agencies that vet these in reports").

While super-brands will continue to pour money into the ad-space simply to buy intent I think for many of the smaller advertisers, which do account for a good proportion of Google Ad revenues, will simply decide to go to other networks.

One thing is for sure: When an Admiral treats their Seamen over such a long-period of time with such contempt, the moment an alternative boat appears on the horizon, most crew won't even wait for the other boat to pull along-side, they'll jump in the waters and take a chance that they can swim to a new platform of hope, on the promise of a more exciting destination.

2Clean

[chewy]

If we're moving towards phrase matching only (and even more automation) how do we go about managing for negatives if they remove (some, but not all) search query data?

Not looking good, especially if you're new at this game.

[2clean]

I know, it's really bad, it is really dishonest and any sane and reasonable person would call it to, but we're still in the gold panning unregulated days when tech companies got away with stuff.
I journeyed back to this board from the future