Adwords Automatic Matching – Tell Google What You Think!

Paid Media / May 28, 2008

There’s been quite a bit of buzz about Google’s new Automatic Matching feature in Adwords. This “limited beta test” feature gives Google the ability to spend any unused portion of your maximum daily budget by analyzing your ads, keywords, and landing pages in your ad groups and then displaying your ads on search queries relevant to this information.

What People Are Saying

A lot of the commentary floating around the forums and blogs are quite critical of this move by Google. I guess it’s normal to see such reactions given the frustration that many advertisers have faced with expanded broad match and Google’s lack of transparency with these type of “updates” in the past. In this case if you’re “randomly” selected for the beta, your campaigns will be automatically affected since you have to manually opt out.

If You Still Want to Test it Out

As with any beta that Google rolls out we recommend being cautious and if you want to test it, do it on a limited scale that you have full control over. In this case, limit the daily budget of the campaign that you have automatic matching on, set your performance benchmarks, test time frame, pull out search query reports and measure the performance closely to make sure that this feature makes sense for you.

Tell Google What You Think!

Google has however given advertisers who are selected to participate in this beta the ability to provide them with feedback on this feature. You can do this (just click on the “Take our survey” link) from within the Campaign Settings page which is also where you can opt out of the automatic matching feature. So make sure to tell them what you think about it!

How to Opt Out and tell Google What You Think:

If you haven’t yet been “invited” to the automatic matching beta test, keep and eye out for the following alert in your Adwords account: