Google. You made broad match worse by turning it into “expanded match” and your automatic bidding tool doesn’t really help those of us handling multi-million dollar campaigns…so why then do you have a new service called “Automatic Matching?”

Oh yeah, more money.

Look, I’m a big fan of Google. Not only because they do provide the most relevant results, have the best work environment in the world for their employees and have been able to sustain a wildly successful business through unheard of growth…but I’m wondering what’s the deal behind this latest feature rollout.

Here’s Google’s explanation of the service:

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.

Basically if you’re not hitting your daily budget caps they’re going to figure out how to do that for you.

I don’t know about you but I usually keep my daily caps set to a minimum until I discover the keywords that work best…then bump up the daily caps above the spend threshold for a nice cushion between the limit and what you typically spend in a day. This new service is scary because you might not know that you’re bidding on these new keywords if the service happens to be turned on in your account.

If there were a three strike policy, Google would have 2 1/2 right now.

• Strike 1 - The Content Network: I’m giving it 1/2 because it does actually convert in some cases…and I have an AdSense account
• Strike 2 - Expanded Match: Seriously, broad was good for long phrase terms which you might not think of. It used to be great in capturing people who searched using their primary query then adding various keywords afterwards in no particular order
• Strike 3 - Automatic Matching: This is simply a blatant “let’s figure out how to capture the difference between people’s actual spend and their daily budgets” type of strategy. I hope this isn’t indicative of what’s to come from Google.

Kudos to Google for figuring out how to squeeze a couple more dollars out of every account across the board…but I think their time can be better spent mastering the most important thing in search engine marketing today…tracking. More specifically tracking how each online marketing effort contributes to a sale/action rather than just the last one which triggered the action.

- Brian Renner