by Stacy
21. November 2008 15:24
Some of us online marketeers recently found a very upbeat offer from Google in our inboxes. It started off like this:
‘I'm excited to tell you that you have been selected to participate in a beta for our new Automatic Matching feature.
‘Automatic Matching automatically extends your campaign's reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists.’
Unfortunately, we at atom42 are not quite so excited. While we can see the benefit of Google being able to pick up on potentially profitable keywords which are not already in our account, we have been stung before by Google’s Expanded Broad Match system, and Automatic Matching sounds suspiciously similar.
Both offer to serve ads on keywords which are linked to yours but which you have not bid upon. This type of system can throw up odd keyword matches, though, which are so tenuously related to what you are selling that there is only the slimmest chance of most of these types of ads actually working for you.
The one company they definitely do benefit is Google, because they give Google the opportunity to use up your surplus budget each day, even when your keywords have not generated enough traffic to do this by themselves.
In our opinion, Google should concentrate on their new Search-based Keyword Tool which tells you if there are any keywords which Google deems ‘relevant’ that aren’t already in your account.
This gives the marketeer complete control over which keywords they want to add to their campaign, rather than Google automatically doing it on your behalf. It may not be as profitable for Google in the short term, but in the long term they will have much happier customers!