Since the introduction of Adwords, Google has been rolling out new features regularly. Most of the time, these additions were aimed at helping advertisers to create more targeted and relevant advertising campaigns. Even though the introduction of the Quality Score (QS) algorithm and the associated introduction of minimum bid prices boosted Google’s revenue, the underlying principle was that it would weed out irrelevant ads from the Adwords system.

Last week however it emerged that Google is beta testing a feature called ‘Automatic Matching’. What this will do is match your ads to keywords you’re not actually bidding on but which Google deems relevant to your campaign, in order to ensure that your monthly budget limits are reached.

Some analysts see this feature as a sign that Google is feeling the pressure of Wall Street and is (desperately) looking to maintain its revenue growth.

As an Adwords professional I do know that this feature offers no benefit at all to a knowledgeable advertiser although there are three parties which could potentially benefit from it.

1. Google: there is no denying that Google will increase its revenue implementing this feature. Most advertisers set their budget above what they actually expect to spend to ensure that their campaigns are sufficiently buffered and don’t run out of money during the month. What Google is proposing is creaming off that surplus budget.
2. Corporate advertisers: Not all search engine advertising is ROI based, an increasing portion of spend is dedicated to branding. This is mainly the case for large corporates who can afford not to generate direct revenue from online marketing. Automatic Broad Matching allows them to spend their money without the hassle of running a large PPC campaign.
3. Advertising agencies: For agencies that charge their clients a percentage of spend, Automatic Broad Matching offers the same benefits as it does to corporate advertisers. It enables them to spend more of their clients’ money (and increase their revenue) without the additional effort of running a large campaign, just sit back and let Google do the work for you.

Would I ever use this feature (luckily you can opt-out)? Definitely not.

As a company, we believe in adding value for our clients and based upon years of experience, we are of the opinion that running a campaign using large scale broad matching is not the way to go about it. Not only because broad matches are a poor indicator of a user’s intent and often have a poor ROI but also because you lose control over your marketing campaign. Even when you’re only interested in branding, you should be concerned about which keywords trigger your ads. Having seen Google’s broad matching in action, I would say it is far from perfect and not always in the advertiser’s best interest.

Search engine advertising is increasingly becoming more complex and competitive. All the more reason to take charge of how and where to spend your budget and not to rely on the ‘easy’ options being offered by parties who are incentivized to increase your costs.