Yesterday, we touched on the latest change by Google: the sunsetting of Broad Modified Match and expanding of Phrase Match.
Here’s a link to Google’s FAQ explaining the change: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10286719#FAQs&zippy=%2Cwhats-happening-to-bmm%2Cwhat-can-i-expect-to-see-with-my-phrase-and-bmm-traffic
A lot of the folks in our industry saw this as another money grab by the big G. Another move that only benefits Google’s profits, not the advertisers.
We’ll have to see. Google moves in mysterious ways and the matching algorithms are a black box. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
So, the best advice I can give you today is to keep a close eye on what is happening in your phrase and broad modified keywords.
In the meantime, these are some considerations to prepare your account for the change:
If you run the same keywords in separate ad groups for phrase match and broad modified, and have negative keywords that are unique to your BMM ad group, you might want to copy them to your phrase match ad group.
If you are using broad modified keywords that do not have a ‘+’ sign in front of every term in the keyword (e.g., ‘+blue skirts’) you might want to add new purely broad keywords (e.g., ‘blue skirt’) to keep showing for queries like ‘blue dress’.
If the order of words in the user query really matters (e.g., “train from Amsterdam to Eindhoven”) you might want to add negative keywords preventing matching user queries with the wrong order.
For your phrase keywords, it’s likely that you will see an increase in the number of search terms being matched, so keep a close eye on your SQRs. Use n-grams to discover patterns in the newly-matched search terms, and negate bad performers. Here’s a script to help you with that: https://searchengineland.com/brainlabs-script-find-best-worst-search-queries-using-n-grams-228379
Also, because of phrase match being extended, user queries that only match to one keyword might match to multiple keywords in the future. This causes “duplicate search terms,” which makes managing the account structure and keyword bids a bit harder. Prevent duplicate search terms by using this script: https://adsscripts.com/scripts/google-ads-scripts/duplicate-query-checker-across-accounts
Note: If you choose to convert your BMM keywords to phrase match, the BMM keywords’ performance statistics will not carry over to the new phrase instances of the keywords. So, I would leave your BMM keywords as they are if you do not need to change them.
In the end, the ones who are prepared will benefit the most.
How are you preparing yourself? I would love to learn.
– Nils
PS: In case you missed it, here’s a link to Part 1 –> https://nilsrooijmans.com/daily/they-killed-bmm-what-can-we-do