Over the last couple of days a few AdWords advertisers woke from their dream filled slumber to find an email informing them about a new feature beta trial they’ve been selected to be included in called “Automatic Matching” aka “Ultra Broad Match” and whilst I hope it isn’t going to be as bad as Ants being matched to Elephants it doesn’t read too well so who knows what will happen bearing in mind just how “broad” broad match can be.

Extract from the email Google sent  :

“I’m excited to tell you that you have been selected to participate in a beta for our new Automatic matching feature which will be starting on February 28th.

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. By analyzing the structure and content of your website and AdWords campaigns, we deliver more impressions and clicks while maintaining your current CTRs and CPCs.

For example, If you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic matching would automatically crawl your landing page and target your campaigns to queries such as: “shoes” “Adidas” “athletic”, etc., and less obvious ones such as “slippers” that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion on your site.

Be assured that automatic matching will try to never exceed your budget. If you’re already meeting your daily budgets, automatic matching will have a minimal effect on your account.”

Now call me a cynic when it comes to Google these days but it does appear to be a thinly veiled excuse to suck the bones clean of any campaign with spare budget towards the end of the day, and I’m afraid that after seeing campaigns that have been”optimised” by Google’s own AdWords optimisation staff I have little faith in any system they may have developed that will benefit me and likely lead to a conversion on my site after spidering my landing page and then going broader on the traffic terms, I just don’t see it adding value personally unless your keyword selection is dire in the first place.

All you hear from Google are words like relevant and targeted and how having super targeted adgroups on relevant adcopy to relevant targeted landing pages is rewarded with a better Quality Score and now they are saying they are going to crawl your landing pages to “target” your campaigns yet the example they give is like a sniper swapping his specialist rifle and scope for a shotgun and sunglasses i.e from “Adidas shoes” to just “shoes ” or “slippers” or the even more scary “athletic” !!

I like the phrasing of the email, for one thing when Google gets “excited” you know someone somewhere is going to be paying more, secondly they are extending your campaigns reach by using “surplus” budget, now excuse me but surplus budget is there as a result of people having budgets set far higher than the level of traffic they can find but being prepared to spend that much IF Google could supply traffic that converts the same as the existing traffic does, some people have campaigns set at thousands of dollars per day when they only manage to get a few hundred dollars worth of targeted traffic so now Google is looking to fill that “surplus” inventory with automatic matching or ultra broad match traffic, which may well be far less targeted than the keywords that are already in the adgroup, i.e from “Adidas shoes” to just “shoes” or “slippers” ! In my opinion this is a step away from targeted, it’s going backwards and will result in more irrelevant traffic and whilst I’m sure there will be the odd winning keyword found by it I think this move smacks of desperation to milk more revenue out of those who aren’t quite on the ball.

To my mind this could be classed almost on par with click fraud as you THINK you are bidding on RELEVANT terms yet you could be showing for terms that will not convert even though Google consider that they are technically relevant as a result of being related to the root term, Sure if you sell Adidas shoes then it is classed as a shoe but that may well be way too broad to be paying for traffic on for you and don’t even get me started on “slipper” or worse still “athletic” .. this is just crazy and that’s the BEST example they could think of giving !?, Oh and whilst we are on the subject of crazy, according to webmaster world’s resident Google representitive the automatic matching is going to be opt out.. not opt in.. so there are going to be some very loud screams from people with huge budgets set and miss the email telling them it’s going live or fail to understand the implications of it.

On a plus note they say that the automatic matching terms you are getting clicks on will be visible if you run a search query report and this will help in adding extra keywords to bid on and negatives to exclude traffic but unless the search query report is upgraded to include all the terms traffic has been sent on then it’s still going to be like fumbling in the dark at times as you’ll get a report with lots of keywords then a cell saying “382 other unique phrases” which is just plain annoying, that could be 382 prospective negatives I need to add.

Expanded broad match was bad, i.e showing for “vibrating tooth brush” and “vibrating alarm clock” when bidding on the term vibrator on broad match, OK yes technically they all vibrate but how different and irrelevant to each other from a sales point of view could they be !? there is no way anyone searching for any one of the three would end up buying one of the others so it’s a three way triangle of irrelevant relevancy so Ultra broad match will be something even “better” than expanded broad match no doubt.

It’s early days and much is still speculation so it could turn out to be a valid and welcome addition to the AdWords armoury but on first impression after donning my special agent cereal pack freebie Google email decryption glasses I’d say you better be ready to opt out of it when it goes live for the masses, or at the very least bring those daily budgets right down to more realistic levels so as not to get caught out.