Google Adwords Match Type Change – Opt-In or Opt-Out?

Google recently rolled out a change to the Adwords exact and phrase match types, so your ads will also be triggered for misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations of your exact and phrase match keywords. This is a default setting at the campaign level in Adwords. Good news is that you can opt out of this change by updating the keyword matching options setting as shown below.

So what does this change mean for your campaign? Should you opt-in or opt-out? Let’s find out.

Advantages
• Your website will get more (and mostly qualified) traffic.
• You have to spend less time searching for misspellings and close variants of your keywords.
• Your keyword list will be shorter, so you have less number of keywords to manage and maintain bids.
• Your keyword list does not have to contain misspellings, so you can use dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) Ads, which can help improve click through rates.

Disadvantages
• This is a campaign level settings, so all your keywords in the campaign will be affected by this change, you cannot be selective.
• Misspellings and plurals can have lower conversion rates or may not convert at all.
• Your bid is the same for the exact/phrase match keywords as well as plurals and misspellings. You may not meet your ROI goals if they convert differently.

When to opt out of this change
• Your campaign is limited by budget.
• You have historical data showing that your campaign is not profitable for misspellings or plurals.

Best practices for implementing this change
• Test the setting on your campaigns so you can decide whether to opt-in or opt-out.
• Monitor your campaign performance, mainly your conversion rates and cost per conversions after you implement this change and revert the change if needed.
• Monitor your search queries and add negative keywords to your campaign.
• Add profitable search queries to your keyword list so you can bid on them separately in order to meet your ROI goals.

Since every business and every campaign is different, best way to know if this change is profitable for your business is to test it.

Have you implemented this change in your account yet or did you opt out? How is it working for your campaign? We would love to know!