Google Adwords Launches Dangerous New Automatic Matching Feature

Adwords Beta testers have recently received the following email from their Adwords account managers inviting them to test a new feature: “Automatic Matching.”

“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.”

We would counsel avoiding this feature like the plague if and when it does get a general release. Even standard Broad Match terms should be tightly monitored and treated with caution to make sure they don’t overly drain your daily budget. This tool will actually attempt to spend your whole budget every day, expanding to less and less relevant keywords. There goes your carefully crafted relevant landing page, followed by your campaign ROI out the window!

Currently the feature is an extremely limited beta, so whether or not this feature gets implemented remains to be seen. We would counsel The Big G to make the feature an opt-in one rather than a default when you open an account.

Education of new Adwords users should also be a high priority, as it could quickly lead to another generation of casualties with very empty bank accounts.