Coming soon to a PPC campaign near you...Automatic Matching!

The latest Pay-Per-Click (PPC) beta to be rolled out by Google is Automatic Matching. On June 3rd 2008, your PPC campaign will be automatically opted into this feature....so what's it all about?

Automatic matching is designed to show your ads for keywords you may have missed. Google scans ads, keywords, and landing pages and takes it upon itself to display your ads for (what it deems) relevant search terms that you didn't include in your keyword list. This works in the same was as Google's keyword tool, whereby you can now enter a website URL and the keyword tool will analyse the website to produce a keyword list.

In the keyword tab of your ad groups, you will see an "Automatic Matching Total" – and the CTR, CPC, conversion etc data associated with these mysterious keywords. At this moment in time, you cannot see data for individual 'Automatic Matching' keywords in the interface (although you can run a Search Query report).

From a personal point of view, my initial reaction to this beta was annoyance. Google already overrides me as a PPC Account Manager when it shows 'Ghost Ads' (see: http://www.clickconsult.co.uk/PPCBlog/ppc-strategies/introducing-googles-ghost-ads.html) instead of the specific ads I created for an ad group. Now Google is overriding me again by getting clicks for God knows what keywords. Of course, if I see lots of cheap conversions when I check the ‘Automatic Matching Total’ of my clients accounts, I will be more than happy to take credit for it!