Get talking to any experienced digital marketer and you’ll notice they all have one thing in common.
Whatever platform, industry or business they work in, every single one will have developed a healthy level of cynicism over the course of their career. It makes sense - constantly adjusting activity based on unannounced platform changes, market trends, and the motivations of the major advertising platforms would create doubts for even the most optimistic marketer.
In Paid Search, one trend has stood out from the pack as a focus for skepticism over the past year. That trend? The heavy push across multiple advertising platforms towards the use of Broad Match keywords as a solution for all your account problems. You’d be hard-pressed to find a marketer who’s unwaveringly enthusiastic about Broad Match given some of the historical challenges with this keyword type and the most recent push has been met with all the cynicism that would be expected from experienced marketers.
So where is this skepticism coming from? Let’s look at some of the key challenges Broad Match creates.
1) Broad Means Broad
Broad Match does what it says on the tin. Advertising platforms will take a Broad Match keyword and apply it to searches that it considers related to that keyword. The search may contain some of the actual words in the keyword, it may contain synonyms for those words, and in some cases, it may match to something completely unrelated. For example, if you're targeting the keyword "running shoes" with broad match, an ad could appear for searches like "tennis shoes" or "workout gear", which are only somewhat related to the product on offer.
While the relevance of clicks will improve over time as the platform learns which search terms to match to, many accounts don’t have the budget to spare on irrelevant clicks while the algorithm learns. This is particularly challenging for accounts with a smaller budget as it’s a chicken and egg scenario - more data means the algorithm can learn faster, but generating more data means spending more budget on irrelevant search terms early on.
2) Lack Of Transparency
Irrelevant search terms are frustrating, but smart use of negative keywords can help to minimize the impact these have on an account, right? Well, not quite.
Google Ads now collates up to 50% of clicks into a single line on the search term report called “Filtered Search Terms” with no option to expand this to see the individual search terms driving spend. While the announcement of this change mentioned that it would only consist of search terms without significant data, even one irrelevant click is too many and marketers are rightly skeptical of how quality optimization can be done without full access to search term data.
Given the choice between a well-built out Exact Match keyword list where marketers know exactly what terms users are visiting the site from compared to optimizing based on 50% of Broad Match traffic volume, it makes sense that uptake has been lower than anticipated.
3) Questioning Motivations
The relationship between marketers and advertising platforms has been increasingly fractured in recent years, with marketers feeling the platforms are increasingly pushing automation and giving recommendations based on increasing spend rather than increasing performance.
The recommendations tab in Google Ads often contains strange suggestions that even at a glance would obviously decrease performance while pushing up spend. These automatic suggestions, combined with recommendations from Google’s own reps that don’t align with an account’s goals, have created a lack of trust between marketers and platforms. As one marketer pointed out, if widespread adoption of recommendations leads to an average monthly increase in account spend of $20, when multiplied by the total number of Paid Search accounts that’s a significant increase in monthly revenue for the advertising platforms.
So, what’s the solution? The key idea here is trust and mutual information sharing. Marketers are rightly skeptical of the push towards Broad Match and the impact it might have on their accounts. After all, we all want to run the best activity possible for our clients.
If the platforms want to encourage adoption of this tactic, they need to make concessions such as giving marketers full access to the search term report rather than hiding up to 50% of information. Automatic recommendations need to be continually improved with a focus on account performance rather than spend. Finally, reps should acknowledge the historical reasons marketers have for hesitation about Broad Match and address these concerns specifically, rather than continually pushing a product without room for conversation - that’s what true sales is about.
For more information on Broad Match & how to run a well optimised account, get in touch.