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Google Ads now pushing Broad Match keywords as “Recommended” every time you add more keywords. How much more money does this company need to make?
Don’t know if everyone else is seeing it, but as of today in Google Ads I get a giant popup below the keywords box that says:
“Use broad match to get more conversions at a similar or better ROI.”
and a CTA button with
**”Change keywords to broad match.”**
No Google, I don’t want to opt in to your shitty “AI-driven” keyword recommendations that provide the most irrelevant queries leading to thousands and thousands of wasted $ per month.
Seriously, how much cash does this company need to make? Same deal with any time you speak to one of their “account managers” for “advice”, all it ever comes down to is “raise your CPC’s, increase your budgets”, blah fucking blah ?
Lame.
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12 Replies
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Broad match, heavy negative keyword campaigns have been the most sophisticated and profitable accounts on the platform. They want to move advertisers in the direction. Resisting it is foolish and to your own detriment.
Google’s rank and file, outsourced account managers are terrible, so I agree with you there.
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The thing is, sooner or later, you will be forced to use Broad match because Google will purposefully lower the performance of bid strategies when you don’t use Broad. Your Google rep will then tell you that smart bidding needs Broad to work well. So you’ll have to add them.
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In theory, they are right and it’s a good idea. Machine learning is good enough nowadays that it can choose the search queries better than most humans and you can keep it from getting out of control by limiting the CPA.
In practice though, that strategy doesn’t work well for most small budget accounts cuz there isn’t enough data. You have to be getting a lot of conversions for it to work consistently and at scale.
I’ve been telling my clients, “it’s called machine learning, not machine I’ve-already-learned” so adjusting to new strategies like this will take some time. -
The reason behind this is that the AI is now good enough to determin what the person is actually looking for and marketers are usually bad at covering everything. So their statement is true for 95% of the marketers out there (me included).
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They need to make 40% more every year
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I have been resisting broad since they took away broad match modified and my campaigns have suffered badly ever since.
I am now trying broad in a campaign that uses TCPA and gets about 15 – 30 conversions a day. 1st day was yesterday, and the wasted spend was wild – it targeted everything and my CPA was double my target.
But I’m hoping that TCPA will do it’s thing after the learning phase and the CPA will be on target but I’ll just get more conversions as I’m covering more search terms. We’ll see.
TCPA does work for me generally – my average CPA is almost exactly on target. So provided it achieves that, I shouldn’t really be worried about match type; if anything I should go as broad as possible so long as I’m still getting conversions at my target price.
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Some thoughts:
– There’s a legacy perception that broad match is crap but Google is getting better and better at understanding search intent.
– It’s consistently helping some of my clients find conversions from queries they wouldn’t have targeted otherwise.
– It MUST be paired with a conversion based bid strategy.
– When launching new bid strategies with broad, you will highly likely see a spike in spend and performance fluctuation. It’s important to give it a few days until it ‘calibrates’.– Not giving it a go just because of it’s legacy reputation is a huge missed opportunity. Times have changed and it can/should be tested.
Edit: format
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They merged their analytics and paid ads teams about 5 years ago. For me, the writing has been on the wall since then. They are going to maximize revenue every possible way they can, including this scummy shit.
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This really depends on your industry, performance and budget. I have some accounts that are focused on extremely niche B2B industries that overlap with massive B2C ones. You simply cannot run broad match in these accounts without blowing the majority of your budget on wildly irrelevant searches. This is only a few of all of my accounts right now – most see solid performance with BMM / new phrase match and a few specific really solid broad match after spending some time on negatives.
I generally never start with broad on a new campaign – go phrase, build out negatives a bit, then start opening it up more if it makes sense.
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just want to say I am all aboard the “Google is always trying to steal our money” train, and I rarely listen to their recommendations. But I have started testing broad match keywords against my exact and phrase match ad groups and the broad match is working quite well. Definitely worth trying some if you have been avoiding them
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Jumping on the scummy google train, make sure in your account settings you don’t have apply auto recommendations. I started seeing random ass keywords added into my exact campaigns that had no relevance at all
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I don’t like google’s recommendations but since last year I started using campaigns with exclusively broad and broad modified with heavy emphasis in detecting negative keywords and max. Clicks and we got cheaper conversions.
It’s the noobiest strategy but legit. I got it from a woman in spain that tested a lot.
Today without broad modified or a reliable search term report I’m not able to do it with every campaign but some times it works and saves you time and money.
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