Fancy a Swim with AdWords Latest Shark?

In an earlier article on The Perils of Broad Match Keywords, we highlighted some of the pitfalls of this form of matching...

...now Google is beta-testing an option which is potentially far more damaging to your budget...

Google's new feature is called "automatic matching" and, earlier this year, selected clients in the USA received the following letter from their AdWords account manager:

"Automatic Matching automatically extends your campaign's reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists...

For example, If you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic Matching would target your campaigns to queries such as: "shoes" "adidas" "athletic", etc., and less obvious ones such as "slippers" that our system has determined will benefit you..."

Aside from the obvious question of why Google believe a site selling

Adidas trainers would benefit from visitors looking for slippers, we can see no benefit to the advertiser from this new feature.

Our AdWords Training Courses cover the different Match Types in some detail. Google's introduction of Expanded Broad Match has already made life more difficult, by compelling advertisers to make extensive use of Negative keywords, or avoid Broad Match altogether.

Automatic Matching simply makes this problem worse and - in our opinion - is little better than running ads on the Content Network. Google seems to agree as - like Content ads - automatically matched ads do not contribute to your Click-Through Rate (CTR).

Automatic Matching also contradicts Google's rules on relevance. What's the point of writing highly-targeted landing pages if the keywords around which they're designed aren't accurately matched?

If you're selling specific models of Samsung TV, how would you feel if Google matched your ads to searches for models you don't have in stock? This was the experience of one unhappy client in the US trial.

Google currently plans to make Automatic Matching an opt-out feature of AdWords (as with Content Network ads). Forget to opt-out, and it won't just be a "bigger boat" you'll be needing - it's a bigger budget.