“Today, we’re announcing updates to search ad query matching and brand controls.”
It’s been a while since a sentence from Google has elicited such a positive reaction from the PPC community.
Last month’s changes to queries, match types and negative keywords were a welcome reminder that Google wants agencies and advertisers to trust them.
In this article, I’ll explain each of the changes for advertisers and PPC agencies and how they inform us about the future direction of Google for paid keywords and targeting.
Breaking down Google’s query matching enhancements
Ginny Marvin’s tweet may be the first update in years that everyone has welcomed. Interestingly, these updates align with the idea of search topics and the future that Google Ads wants.
Trademark Exclusions and Inclusions
We’ve been able to use brand exclusions – distinctly different from negative keywords – by choosing from a brand database and telling Google that you don’t want to show up for searches for those brands.
Now there’s the opposite of that, what Google is now calling “brand engagement” for search campaigns.
You’ll have the option to close the match types in your campaign and make it exclusively broad match, and then put in the brand inclusion lists to tell Google to show your ad for broad match queries just about anything, as long as it’s brand related.
This is a great example of Google moving away from fixed match types.
Broader coverage for negative keywords
Until now, we’ve had to add more negative keywords than ideal because they didn’t take misspellings and close variants into account. Google is improving that “negative match”.
Not sure why this wasn’t there before. It’s one of those things that feels like an obvious move from the start. Perhaps this is because this will actually lose Google money with more keywords automatically blocked.
Whatever the reason, I’m glad to see them improving how negative keywords work.
Improving the collection and reporting of search terms
Continuing the theme of simplifying match types into topics, brands are now becoming a topic that we can include or exclude. It’s the same with search terms.
Google is now aggregating more search terms, so they are also blocking many keywords from search term reports due to privacy.
People are upset about this, which is both understandable and controversial.
By grouping keywords into search topics, Google will show more data indirectly. Instead of having three different versions of the same keyword with misspellings, it can be wrapped into one that is very close and has more visible data. It does not change that the topics in the searches are set to overcome the keywords bit by bit.
Perhaps the biggest part of this is the Insights tab in Performance Max.
I’m grateful that Google is showing more data about search terms in Performance Max, especially compared to how it started. But it is not a pure search term report. There are search topics grouped into categories.
And that’s where it all goes.
My Prediction: In the next 24 months, there will be no match types
Google Ads is moving to a point where you’ll set up a search campaign, add search topics, and then tell the system which brands to include and exclude.
At the moment, only Performance Max has branding exceptions, but Google has announced plans to roll it out to Search.
Let’s say you have a general “Search” campaign and you don’t want to appear for competitor names. Instead of adding negative keywords, you’ll simply exclude competing brands.
I like this because it covers a lot of misspellings, close variants and things of that nature.
While it’s a nice extra level, my hope is that they don’t remove negative keywords.
Get the daily newspaper research that marketers rely on.
Search topics: The future of keywords
Google as a platform is developing rapidly and significantly. It is unknown where it was two years ago; two years from now, it won’t be anywhere near where it is now.
You can see that in the redesign of the Google Ads interface – some things are being moved away and hidden from view under certain menus, while other things are being pulled forward.
Research topics were not present when Performance Max was first released; they were just like any other audience signal, requiring you to create a custom keyword list.
It seems that Google quickly realized that because Performance Max pulls the dynamic search component of DSAs, they could incorporate it as a more standalone feature.
When you’re building a Performance Max campaign today – and this is much more important for non-buying Performance Max – the lack of a product feed makes audience signals critical to reaching the right audience.
When there is a supply, Google uses the product data to find searches in shopping inventory and determine who your customer is. Without one, you use audience signals and search topics to tell the system who you believe will buy from you.
In addition to all best practices, search topics tell the system what kind of traffic it’s best to show up for (eg, specific search terms, topics, and anyone searching for “x” or “y”).
These don’t necessarily have to be immediately related to what you’re selling. It can be terms that people search for that indicate they would also buy your product.
If you look at the evolution of various features around keywords in the last couple of years, custom intent became the main search topic. They are more prominent and in creating sets of assets instead of a step down in audience signals.
Tread carefully: How wide is too wide?
Much of the resistance to Google’s changes isn’t so much about technology, but agencies and brands feeling like they have less transparency and reduced control.
A lot of the hype about system rollback doesn’t account for how research itself has changed. Requests like wanting keywords to be exactly one-for-one usually come from a handful of Google Ads professionals.
However, there is also some validity to the criticism.
There are (and always will be) certain industries where you need that specificity and fine-tuning. Some of the biggest are pharmaceutical and legal, especially work injuries and auto accidents. In these areas, the system can be very liberal.
It doesn’t hurt that much for the biggest advertisers who spend million dollar budgets. But if you’re campaigning for a local attorney on a $10,000 budget, these broad matches don’t make sense.
Once Broad Match learns what’s up with your account, it gets pretty good at attracting new leads. It will cost you time and money to let him learn what works, but what happens when the volume isn’t there?
In that situation, there are only three levers you can pull to make a search campaign appear in more auctions:
- Expand your target location. If you can’t serve beyond a certain area, you can’t aim outside of it.
- Increase your bids or decrease bid targets. This is expensive and not accessible to everyone. Plus, at some point, you’ll have increased your bids enough to capture up to 90% of what’s available. There’s not much more you can do.
- Add more keywords or match types. This will certainly expand your reach, though not always significantly.
Combine a relatively common search (like “auto accident attorney”) with a low-volume location (like a small town of 10,000 people) and it’s hard to see broad match ever reaching a point where it works in that kind of situation.
I hope Google has a plan to handle that scenario differently than people all over the US looking for sneakers. Otherwise, I can see the platform becoming prohibitively expensive for some brands and businesses.
A use case in balance and importance
Historically, Google has looked at what’s best for all advertisers—that is, millions upon millions of customers with varying budgets, configurations, and expertise levels. They should think about it from this approach.
But as an agency, we are only concerned with taking care of our clients.
My agency works extensively with healthcare clients and one of those verticals is called applied behavior analysis (ABA) – a very specific type of therapy for children with autism.
If I apply a phrase or exact match to that keyword, it will bring in highly targeted traffic from people looking for ABA therapy for their children. The second we passed broad matching in a test, we got clicks from people looking for cognitive behavioral therapy and general therapy for people with autism.
The broad fit takes it away from ABA to a more general treatment, from children to adults and adolescents. For my clients, none of this matters. But at the same time, not all traffic is trivial – only about 50%.
When your budget isn’t as deep as the Fortune 500, 50% of your junk searches quickly become expensive.
For smaller and growing accounts, it’s usually a good idea to start with phrase or exact match and layer on broad match after capturing at least 80% of the impression share if you need to increase the volume of information. In doing so, you must understand that the quality of the lead may decline.
What you need to do to prepare
You’d be hard-pressed to find a PPC marketer who doesn’t think Google could do a few things better.
Google is changing from an analytics-laden, action-driven platform to a larger information sharing platform.
It’s important to stop thinking in terms of clicks and conversions and instead consider audiences, search behavior and creative assets.
We are almost going back to a traditional marketing or advertising mentality. To be completely honest, you should have made this transition at least four or five years ago.
I often think that someone starting with Google Ads today is in a better position because they are free of preconceived ideas about how things used to be done and how they “should” be done or striving for the good old days. .
Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce recently shared a presentation called “Decoding PMax,” whose introduction resonates deeply with what I’ve always advocated: People often say that you can’t “optimize” Max Performance because you have to set it and forget it. . , but the reality is that there is a lot to do. It’s not necessarily in the campaign.
Pursuing brute force through Performance Max optimization is a losing battle.
So focus on what really matters:
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