I don't run a huge number of campaigns, I have four on currently, three started this year.
exact match (close variant) has significantly upped the time I need to spend knocking a campaign into shape, and its early performance.
e.g. I'll have [topic service provider] as a keyword
Google will now show my ads for [topic] or even [related topic]
This lowers my CTR, uses up my budget faster when people do click, and lowers my conversion rate when people doing information searches end up on a service provider's website.
This wouldn't be quite so bad were I able to see what I got clicked for, but...
On one account over the first month 39% of my search terms were hidden from me. 39%.
To now, I have found that Google Ads can still be productive for low volume high margin providers. And one campaign this year in a lower margin niche will probably still be a win for the client because they have such a great retention rate YoY that even a trickle of new custom is worth it in the long run.
But this 'close variant' nonsense means that I need to anticipate a whole new set of negative keywords that differ in intent from my actual exact match keywords and block these as exact match negatives.
And lately I have found that even with what previously would have been laser-targeted campaigns, conversion rates are not what they used to be.
It blows my mind the short term view from within Google that has won out here to bring this in.
Other advertisers are no doubt having their ads shown for terms they don't want (and searchers are seeing ads they didn't really ask for) so this isn't even just another instance of Google over-milking their paying customers, it actually damages the relevance of their core product across the board.
Maybe they actually DO believe that their AI knows better than advertisers about what they need to be found for :)
