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Starting next month, Google plans to silently change the way your existing Adwords campaign works.  These are changes that, unchecked, could cost you a ton of money.  And what’s worse, is that you may never figure out why – because the cause of the decreased performance would be completely hidden from you.

Here’s what’s going to happen:

Google has made “improvements” to Exact match and Phrase match to make them fuzzy.  That means that when you advertise on a keyword, you’ll now be automatically advertising on misspellings, plurals, and any other form of the word.

Sounds kind of subtle, right?  No big deal, maybe it *is* an improvement.

Okay, so they’re different searches.  So, what? 

Here’s the big deal:  Google is taking away your ability to advertise on one and *not* the other – they’re doing it to your existing campaign, and they’re doing it without asking.

Google is taking away your ability to advertise on one and *not* the other – they’re doing it to your existing campaign, and they’re doing it without asking.

Ever since the beginning of Adwords, when you’d buy you could be sure that you weren’t showing up on lesser performing variants.  Ten years of books and blogs and videos explaining the way Adwords works tell that story.  There are thousands of articles alone discussing whether or not it’s a good idea to buy misspellings, tools devoted to it.  It will take years for this “improvement” to become common knowledge.

Fortunately, there’s a way to opt out on a campaign-by-campaign basis and I’ll show you how later.  But, first I want to talk about this misspelling behavior.

Why Misspellings Matter — More Than You Might Expect

Google says:  “…your ad will be eligible to show when people search for close variants — yes, that includes misspellings — of your keywords.”

So, that means by default [travarteen flooring] = [travertine flooring].  There’s a whole body of knowledge discussing when and why it’s a good or bad idea to buy misspellings, but now it will all be done automatically, and by default you won’t even know you’re doing it.

I’d personally argue that people searching for the misspelled variant “travarteen flooring” result in smaller sized transactions because people who can’t spell tend to have less money to spend.  The “dumb people are poor” argument applies more to $10k flooring orders than ringtones.   But don’t take my word for it; the market speaks in advertisers betting their money in the SERPs:

So, anecdotally, only two advertisers feel betting on the misspelling is a good idea, vs. ten on the proper spelling.

So, if you do nothing with your existing campaign and you are currently buying [travertine flooring] as an exact match, next month you’ll start showing up on “travarteen floors”, “travertine floor” and pretty much anything else Google wants to call a stem, variation, misspelling, acronym, or whatever else they want.  Exact match, in the classic sense, will be dead by default.

Furthermore, you’d never know it because you’ll just see your list of keywords in your ad groups just like they’ve always been there.  The good news is that we at SpyFu will have your back.  We’ll keep tracking the misspellings and the stems and variations so you’ll see the stuff you’re showing up on that you don’t particularly mean to. So, that’s cool. That’s our mission after all — to keep your Adwords campaigns profitable.

But, there is a way to *opt out* of these changes.

I strongly suggest doing this to all your campaigns.  Here’s what you need to do:

Existing Campaigns

1. Click the Campaigns tab. Select the campaign you’d like to change the matching options for.
2. Click the Settings tab.
3. Scroll to the “Advanced settings” section. Click the Keyword matching options link.
4. In the “Exact and phrase match” section, select Do not include close variants.

New Campaigns

1. Click the Campaigns tab.
2. Click +New campaign.
3. Scroll to the “Advanced settings” section. Click the Keyword matching options link.
4. In the “Exact and phrase match” section, select Do not include close variants.

I thought I’d finish a few  examples of soon-to-be-unjustly-equivocated keywords.  Post your own examples in the comments.

[high performance computer] = [high performance computing]  = [high preformense cpu]   (yes, cpu.  Google says acronyms work.  Here’s one: FML)

[free credit report] = [freed credits reporting] = [freed creditor reports]

This article is from the courtesy of SpyFu…………thanks Spyful for letting all of us know!