Bored with Broad Match

Working as a dedicated Pay Per Click manager on a number of varied accounts, from time to time you will come across issues that you haven’t dealt with before and will have to find different solutions to resolve them. Pay per click after all is still an industry in its infancy. My latest frustration has come in the form of matching options, but to be more specific ‘broad match’.

Around our office a discussion has been raging on for the last few weeks. Time and time again, after running search query reports, we are finding obscure search queries matching up to keywords on broad match within the pay per click account. A prime example of this occurred only this morning, where an ad was served under the search term ‘nintendo ds deals’ and was an expanded match from the broad match keyword ‘canada holiday deals’. How the Google algorithm finds a match of relevance between these two terms is beyond me, after all this is Google’s lifeblood - RELEVANCE!

Over the last couple of weeks I have been finding these occurrences more and more often over the different pay per click accounts that I manage. Accordingly, I have been working out solutions to these issues along the road. At first I was using an increased amount of negatives to drill down the possibilities that the keyword could be served for. Now I believe that this may just be a stop gap solution. I’m starting to think that maybe the way forward is to do away with the use of broad match altogether!

The minefield of pay per click is hard to navigate, even for vastly experienced people within the industry. I find new reasons every day why the companies are best to out source this work to the experts who can stay on top of these issues and find solutions to them.