Big changes to some some primary areas in Google AdWords have been released. All ads (unless you opt-out) will be shown for close variations of search queries. Much like broad keywords, this phrase and exact match change will add more clicks to your campaign.
This wouldn’t be such big news if Google wasn’t automatically opting everyone into this keyword matching change. So if you have an active campaign on AdWords, then you will be affected by the change in the coming weeks.
For our AdWords clients that enjoy regularly optimized and maintained campaigns, this is not something you have to worry about because we’ve already started analyzing how this could effect your account and we will be making the needed changes.
For anyone that is managing their campaign themselves, please be aware of how this can change your campaign. We always encourage testing for best results. Don’t ever assume that Google has your best interests in mind. They are a very large company with different goals in mind. Google typically wants to focus on impressions and clicks, but a successful campaign will focus on conversions rather than clicks.
Never take your AdWords campaign to full auto, because Google will change and modify the standards in ways that could negatively affect your account.
However, a large pool of keywords is expensive and it’s likely that you won’t be able to pay a large sum of money indefinitely to advertise for the wide variety of keywords that your customer may or may not use for searches.
Each year Google changes its search algorithm up to 500 times! While many of these changes are minor and are unlikely to directly affect your website’s ranking, there are major updates every few months that affect search results in significant ways.
Linking to another site is great. It’s a natural way to tell other people that you like or recommend that site. However, some websites let the money do the talking for them and paid for those natural links. These links will drive a website to the top of Google, but the fact is that these paid links are against Google’s guidelines.
This month Google announced that they were rolling out updates to their Automated Rules. The first big change was the ability for advertisers to now create up to 100 rules. Previously it had only been 10 rules, so that’s a huge improvement. Second, they added the ability for users to undo the changes made by a rule.
