Google Ads is a powerful and immediate way to put your business in front of your target prospects. The power behind Google Ads lies in keyword optimization. Proper Google Ads strategy ensures that your ad achieves the maximum clicks from people who are actually looking to buy your product or service.

Understanding how the recent Google phrase update affects your paid advertising strategy is vital for online marketing experts to sustain profitable marketing spend for clients. The goal of this update, according to Google, is to help you reach more of your target customers and optimize the returns on your marketing dollars.

Here’s what you need to know.

Google Broad Match Modified Keywords

With the new update, Google is making adjustments to its broad match and phrase match modifier. This will enable businesses to reach customers, irrespective of how they are using the keywords for their search. Prior to this update, advertisers on Google ads could reach customers with following types of keyword matches:

 

  • Exact precision match
  • Broad match for greater reach
  • Broad match and phrase match modifier

Now the most effective elements of broad match modification will be brought into phrase match. Consequently, phrase match will cover additional traffic from the broad match modifier. This way you can reach your target customers more easily and manage keywords effectively in your Google Ads account.

In other words, this Google phrase update will allow you to reach your target prospects simply by using the phrase match, while avoiding the irrelevant searches. Here is an example of how Google broad match modified keywords will now work.

Suppose you are a moving company seeking to reach clients who are planning to move out of Dallas. With the new phrase match update, you will be able to reach targeted people that are planning to move from Dallas to Atlanta (for example), while avoiding your ad to show up for individuals planning to move from Atlanta to Dallas.

 

Other examples include:

Original Search Query: vacations in Hawaii

Post-update Query Match: vacation spots in Hawaii

Original Search Query: short sleeve dress

Post-update Query Match: short sleeve lace dress

Original Search Query: men’s boots

Post-update Query Match: new men’s size 40 boots

Google Phrase Update – Best Practices 

Google recommends the following best practices to enable you to maximize your advantage from the new and forthcoming updates:

  • Track your PPC ad campaign performance and adjust your budget when it is necessary. Your web traffic may fluctuate because of the changes, so be prepared to make adjustments.
  • Review your Recommendations page regularly. Recommendations may include “Add some new keywords” or “Remove irrelevant keywords” to optimize your keyword coverage.
  • Consider using Smart Bidding. If you believe you may be losing coverage, you may use the Smart Bidding tool with broad match. This will help you meet your sales performance goals.
  • Be mindful of negative keywords. Take care to exclude matches which you do not wish to use with negative keywords. The current update doesn’t affect your negative keywords.

 Set Up Your PPC Ad Campaign for Success

 Next Level Marketing has mastered the art and science of pay-per-click ad campaigns. With more than 20 years of internet marketing data, we have the ability to analyze the efficacy of your paid ad campaign, identify the deviations, and recommend course correction measures to maximize your ROI. For a free PPC audit and strategy, call us at 1-844-736-6398 or contact us online today.