Google will begin beta testing its new Automatic Matching feature tomorrow. Invites were sent out to a few AdWords advertisers in the US to participate in the beta test:

I’m excited to tell you that you have been selected to participate in a beta for our new Automatic matching feature which will be starting on February 28th.

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. By analyzing the structure and content of your website and Adwords campaigns, we deliver more impressions and clicks while maintaining your current CTRs and CPCs.

For example, If you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic matching would automatically crawl your landing page and 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 and likely lead to a conversion on your site.

Be assured that automatic matching will try to never exceed your budget. If you’re already meeting your daily budgets, automatic matching will have a minimal effect on your account.

An obvious point from the Google invitation is that a website selling Adidas shoes is very unlikely to benefit from searches for ‘slippers’.

We were surprised to read of the new beta test of Automatic Matching, as Google is already doing most of what the beta test proposes to do through its current broad match keyword setting option. To illustrate this point, have a look at the keyword and search term intelligence provided by the campaign management tool that we use at Altogether Digital. One feature of this tool provides us with historical data on the actual search phrases that triggered our ads on broad match keywords:

In the examples above, Google’s system has determined that the keywords bid on were relevant enough to the phrases searched on by internet users to display the ads. This is something that is already happening – and not a new feature of the Automatic Matching beta test.

In many cases broad match keywords cause our ads to display for relevant search terms. But several of the examples above illustrate the liberties that Google takes with broad keyword matching, as when ads are displayed for keywords that are very different from the broad match keywords we bid on. The way to deal with this is to build extensive negative keyword lists to exclude irrelevant traffic.

In most cases advertisers want targeted traffic through paid search, not the irrelevant traffic that Google is offering through Automatic Matching (and already brings through broad matching). Unfortunately, the advertisers that will suffer from this are the ones that Google is likely to target Automatic Matching to: small advertisers with limited experience managing paid search campaigns, and insufficient budget to justify the use of an advanced bid management system.

We thought that it was nice of Google to reassure us, however, that Automatic Matching can be turned off. In the future will it be set to be on as a default, as is the case with Content Matching currently? If so, many less experienced advertisers may be caught out when they omit to turn off the Automatic Matching setting on their campaigns, with the end result being, in our opinion, a significant influx of less targeted traffic and a big increase in campaign spend for less savvy search marketers.

Header image: frailmuse on Flickr

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