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

If you’re using display URLs in your ads that actually point clickers to a different URL, you’ll want to change those ads before April 1st, 2008. That’s when Google will be strictly enforcing their display URL policy.

We all know they’ve had this policy for some time but it appears that enough people have abused Google’s leniency on this rule (they aren’t lenient on many) enough to where it’s now going to be enforced.

Some questions regarding this enforcement can be found here, but I’m still wondering how they’re going to treat accurate display URLs that may have a “sub directory” which may not actually exist.

For example, let’s say I sell widgets…ha ha ha, don’t think I’m going to use that example, I hate widgets. But seriously, let’s say I’m Golfsmith and want to sell golfballs. I’ll run an ad with the display URL being Golfsmith.com/GolfBalls in order to get a higher quality score and possibly some more click throughs due to bolding.

The actual URL for golf balls on their site is “http://www.golfsmith.com/ps/browse.php?N=287458.” While this URL isn’t exactly what the display URL showed, it’s still very relevant as that’s the golf balls page.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see how they go about enforcing this rule.

-Brian Renner

Point - This sort of takeover would further Microsoft’s reputation of adhering towards the “global domination monopoly”mindset and create less competition amongst search engines.  Ultimately this would suck because it’s the competition between companies which makes them strive to become better.

Counterpoint - Neither Yahoo nor MSN can compete with Google on their own without any sort of amazing technology development or influx of funding.  Of course, additional budget/new guidance doesn’t always help out….just take a look at Ask.com, their PPC program still doesn’t perform after dropping the “Jeeves” and massive television advertising efforts.

-Brian Renner

This sort of deal has been waiting to happen since the two separate search engine entities (Yahoo.com and MSN.com) can’t quite emulate Google enough to draw Pay Per Click advertising dollars.

Microsoft Bids $41 Billion for Yahoo

Yahoo now must now decide whether to deny the deal, go it alone and most likely have to strike a deal with Google, or let Microsoft buy them out and merge under one technology.

They’ll probably do what makes the most financial sense with regards to their PPC platform.  The MSN platform is horrible and needs to be revamped considerably if they want to attract any more advertising dollars.  Yahoo may have more leverage than they think in this deal since their PPC platform, although not even close to being as good as Google’s, is much better than MSN’s.

-Brian Renner

MarketingVox came out with this article recently talking about Google introducing demographic bidding to AdWords.  I’m not sure why this is making headlines now since Google actually made this announcement a couple years ago.

MSN Has Been Doing This
Even when MSN first introduced their demographic targeting feature 1-2 years ago (when they thought it would separate them from Google and pull people in to spend more) I thought it would be just a restriction on the amount of traffic received for some PPC campaigns.  Also, since some of the methods in which the engines gather this demographic data, it may not be 100% accurate (think of how many people fill out inaccurate information for MSN passports).

Google May Have Better Info.
However, I believe Google is pulling their demographic data from a panel, and they’re only using this targeting feature for the content network right now.  This may help make the content network a bit more useable by being able to further select the type of searchers being targeted.  The Google content network is notorious for not providing conversion-rich traffic since it’s basically allowing anyone with a website to display Google ads based on the content of their pages.

This is certainly not a silver bullet for PPC campaign success but another way to further partition the mysterious content network traffic.

Important Caveat
Since the basis of search marketing is the use of keywords to target consumers, any further segregating of potential searchers may just restrict the amount of traffic and number of leads/sales a site receives.  If you or your client are in an industry that is absolutely certain of some basic demographic information then it might be worth using…but in many cases the keywords being used to target are enough to qualify a visitor.

Side Note: Neat Demographic Tool
Speaking of demographic information…this may be more anecdotal than something to base any substantial conclusions on but MSN has a neat tool that shows basic demographic information for either a search query or URL.  Just to test it out I did some obvious searches like AARP.com vs. Facebook.com with decent results.

http://adlab.msn.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx
-Brian Renner