Google seems to have found a way to get AdWords advertisers to spend more money quickly. In June 2012 they introduced a game changer that broadens the keyword match for all the keywords in your account. Even though they defined keyword matches as exact, phrase, broad and enhanced broad – they decided to broaden all of them, overnight and changing your campaigns without permission.

What does the broader match mean?  It means your ads will show more often and for searches that you did not intend it to show for. You will undoubtedly pay for clicks from irrelevant search queries.

Because your ads will show more often, you can expect to spend more money in less time! That is fine if you make more money, but for many of us, we would like to spend money for the most relevant keyword searches and not for the unintended, less likely to convert “close variants”.

What can you do about it? If your campaign is professionally managed, your ad manager should be on top of this. If you are self managing, you can opt out. After sending a request to Google for each of my accounts to have the ability to opt out, they have now included an option in the campaign setting to show ads only with the original match intention and not including the “close variants”.