Comments on: Expanded Broad Match Corrupted Around Aug 20 — Stop Using It!

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:23:39 +0000

How come this isnt illegal, since we never signed up for (in the original ToS) a service that primarily hurts both my PPC campaign and my wallet?

For Pete’s sake – we paid $5.49 for ‘Electronic Data Interchange’ to have it show up for “albanian english dictionary”. I can’t even do a 6 degrees of separation here…

By: AdWords’ Expanded Broad Match and the “1-2 Punch” Are Eating Your Click Money | Clix Marketing PPC Blog

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:37:42 +0000

[...] and Mike Churchill wrote two excellent posts on the topic here and here. The second post describes the “1-2 Punch” phenomenon that we too have [...]

By: Alan Rimm-Kaufman

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:27:06 +0000

More info on broad match error:

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2009/01/21/google-broad-match/

By: Expanded Broad Match - Google Adwords | Blog de posicionamiento web en buscadores (SEO) y marketing online

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:46:42 +0000

[...] Para más información ver aquí [...]

By: WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:37:50 +0000

Thanks for the writeup Jim. After we got burned in August, we followed your exact advice: don't use AdWords broad match at all to avoid expanded broad match altogether. Check out the awful sales numbers I got out of expanded broad match and how much better things look without broad match at all.

By: How to Make Money with AdWords: No Broad Match, No Expanded Match

How to Make Money with AdWords: No Broad Match, No Expanded Match — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:53:47 +0000

[...] Their recommendation is also to just stop using broad match. The put the blame on the new feature on Google trying to meet Wall Street quarterly targets: [...]

By: Carl Parry

Carl Parry — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:05:52 +0000

Yeah we picked this up too;
http://forums.digital-m.co.za/showthread.php?t=2278

But we think we have evidence that “broad match” was expanded to include a user’s search history, and not just semantic variations of a search phrase. It makes sense to try this if you think about it – at least for users anyway. If someone does a search for “apple” then Google have a lot better chance of matching an ad if historically you’ve made a lot of searches for computer terms, music, or fruit; but for us it’s not worked out well. I agree, Google can’t lose here.

By: LynnS

LynnS — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:18:01 +0000

Wow – Thanks. I have been fighting that for over 6 weeks. At least now, I know where to look to make the correction.

By: Terry Howard

Terry Howard — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 04:35:19 +0000

Nice article. The more pressure that can be put on them about this, the better. Expanded broad match is a crock. Previous to implementing an extensive and ever expanding negative keyword strategy, maybe 10% of the terms in the search query report for broad match were relevant. Another 50% were totally irrelevant horrible matches (everything from “used jeans” to “wholesale automatic weapons”) and the rest, well, let’s say they ranged from cartoon sex clips to things that get people put into sex offender databases. Let me tell you, it’s great to learn a client’s brand was associated with that.

By: Adam Audette

Adam Audette — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:12:26 +0000

We’ve been dealing w/ the exact same issue, started about late Aug and really peaked into the “sphere of awful” about 10 days ago. Cost:conversion was through the roof. We notched back the main offenders using phrase and exact, left a few proven phrases in broad, and are watching closely.

This has such a dramatic effect on ROI it’s just silly for Google to do. Need to throttle that down. Then again why not keep it aggressively broad if you’re Google? The big fish with huge spends probably don’t even notice or care, while the smaller players who are careful about conversion costs get hammered.