PPC, Credit Crunch and Automatic Matching

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June 25th, 2008 by Click Consult

PPC campaign can be a costly adventure especially in light of the latest credit crunch when the markets are quieter than ever and consumers' spending is going down. Tough environment means lower profits for both Google and advertisers and at least one of them had to come up with an idea of how to increase those profits.

And today the brand new idea, not surprisingly, came from Google in a form of Automatic Matching. According to Google this feature will display the ads for keywords missed by advertisers' keyword lists to increase an ad exposure and CTR with PPC similar or lower than the existing one. This feature is activated automatically and is going live this weekend.

As you can see it's not a completely philanthropic step, as the advertiser by choosing or missing to opt out of this feature won't be able to monitor what keywords his ad is displayed for and the only way to know is through running a query report.

I personally have a few difficulties with it for the following reasons:
1.    If an advertiser makes an extensive keyword research using keyword tool, why on earth Google should come up with more relevant keywords? There may be only 2 options- or keyword tool not 100% reliable or Google suggests keywords that are not completely relevant.
2.    The only way to see Google’s additional keywords is through running a Query Report. Based on my personal experience the most common keyword on this report is “*** other unique queries”, which is not very helpful.
3.    Some advertisers use a limited number of keywords in order to reduce the total spent or due to very specific industry requirements. Increase in number of less relevant exposures can be damaging and unprofessional.
4.    Google, instead of notifying people directly through sending out e-mails, did so thought the account interface. This doesn’t seem to be a very considerate step as not many people visiting their accounts every day especially in case of the satisfying and consistent performance. This means that during this weekend some companies may lose a lot of money.
5.    And if Google does think that an advertiser should expand its keyword list, why not to send him a link or e-mail with the proposal? I suppose it would be fairer and help establishing trust and respect based relationship with its clients.

Google was disappointing quite a few times this year and as we know a “Dripping water wears away the stone”.

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