A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that ‘phrase match’ was being killed off from search advertising on Google, and I was among those who weren’t very happy about it. The name remains, but effectively, Google is renaming the separate ‘broad match modified’ targeting strategy to ‘phrase match’. So who should be concerned about this?
How much you’ll be affected is probably down to how much you use the old ‘phrase match’. We don’t use it extensively, as one of the main reasons we used it was for keyword research, and ‘broad match modified’ usually performed this function better. If you’re like us, this means that the change won’t affect you too much.
If you use phrase match moderately, beware an increase in clicks – I doubt it’ll be accompanied by an increase in conversions. You might have to move more terms out to ‘exact match’, and use more negative keywords.
And if you’re a really big user of phrase match, you’ll have some serious work to do, because your whole strategy could be overturned here. Again, you’ll probably have to move more terms out to ‘exact match’, if they’ve got sufficient volume.