You are no longer in control of which queries you spend your budget for!
The more queries google matches to advertiser’s keywords the more money google earns. Google made a lot of changes to force more inaccurate matches. Furthermore they are hiding information for which queries you are paying for.
The newest changes like close variant matches, hiding search terms in reports and changes in keyword match types are the most known ones.
Close Variant Matches
The idea of close variants may sound great first: Existing Keywords are able to cover misspellings and typos, etc.. This is great for covering these search terms without the need of adding additional keywords to your account. However the reality looks not that bright: Google is controlling the definition of “Close”. This means that translations, abbreviations or semantic similar search terms are matched, too. Whenever google is changing the algorithm in its matching, the traffic quality will change.
Hiding Search Terms
To worsen things up, google is hiding search queries from you. In other words: Google is sending you poor traffic by matching close variants, but they are hiding a big percentage of those queries. The reaction of advertisers where quite harsh on this change – as a reaction google increased the reported queries by 6-7 times. Most of them had zero clicks – nothing changed on the hidden queries where you spend your money at. You can quickly analyze what it means for your accounts with our Close Variant Analyzer.
Changes in Keyword Match types
Even when you use granular account structures like SKAGs with exact match types you are in trouble now. Even for exact keywords you end up paying for queries that are not even close to your keyword. One big problem is the understanding of semantics: On a global level a match might look semantic similar. When you know your business it is often not similar at all.
Take back control of your Google Ads search terms with PhraseOn!
PhraseOn lets you optimize your negative keywords with a single click. You only need a browser and Ads account. Simply import your search query reports and enjoy the power of automation and data science. PhraseOn analyzes your Ads data to let you negativate queries where necessary.
Analyze N-Grams instead of full queries
Use N-Grams instead of looking at complete queries! It will increase sample size and it will enable you to make stable data driven decisions. But it gets even better: Using single words as negative keywords, it will maximize the blocking of future and unseen queries that share the same pattern. Assign ngrams to entities easily to better understand the nature of your traffic and get aggregated performance numbers on larger groups.
PhraseOn is able to use all the Conversion Actions available in your account. This empowers you to analyze the search patterns also on micro conversions. The huge advantage of this approach: If you have 20 clicks on queries that contain a specific word you can’t judge on transactions. If you use micro conversions instead, for example if no one of those 20 clicks stayed longer than 20 seconds on your website, you can bet this traffic is unwanted noise.
Detect close variants, misspellings, and compound words
When it comes to blocking search queries, Google is really strict. A broad match negative in singular is not likely to cover its plural form. When you discover a poor n-gram, you need to block all these close variants to avoid wasting your budget.
PhraseOn shows you close variants of n-grams you already identified as noise. We are using the same Natural Language Processing technologies google is using to match close variants – of course in the opposite way.
Classify your Search Traffic Using Entity Lists
Build logical groups of words and get detailed performance metrics for those subsets. We can automatically import and synchronize e.g. your product data feeds to fill entity lists for product brands, categories or product attributes like size or color.
Sometimes you want to exclude that traffic from generic search campaigns or dynamic search ads. It is also great for query sculpting within google shopping.
Of course you can also start with logical groups like competitor names or products/categories you do not cover on your website. Don’t waste your money for poor performing traffic like that.
Combine this with PhraseOns capability of enriching those items with close variants traffic routing gets easy and fully automated.
Bringing Actions to your Google Ads Account with PhraseOn - Start your FREE Test today!
We own everything when it comes to Negative Keyword Management in Google Ads. We think every account should have a centralized process for adding negative keywords in a data driven way. Especially when working together in larger teams this is crucial for staying transparent.
