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Google Automatic Matching Test Only Generated 1 Click!Posted by Amber on May 28, 2008 in Basic PPC Strategies |
Back in March I wrote a post on the new Google Adwords Automatic matching beta, as well as Joe my colleague wrote on the subject just last week. At the time none of my accounts qualified for the beta and I hadn’t quite formed an opinion of the new feature until now.
Last week I got an email from my Google rep. letting me know that one of my accounts has qualified for the beta, and although Google said it would be an automatic opt-in, it wasn’t. However, a large number of accounts are being automatically opted-in. To be safe I would double check your account either way. Since I was very interested in how this was going to work and what it was going to do to my traffic, PPC spend and overall revenue, I enabled the feature.
If you’re account is eligible for the new automatic matching all you have to do is go into your account campaign settings, in the advanced options settings there is a new option for Automatic Matching and all you have to do is check the box next to it that reads, ‘Show ads on more search queries without adding keywords.’
I’ve had a full week in running the new feature and I’m sad to report I only received one additional click from the automatic matching test. However, when I ran a search query report to find the term that showed my ad through the automatic matching feature, it wasn’t a keyword I wanted to target, therefore costing me $.25 in an irrelevant click to my site.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that all automatic matching queries in the future will be irrelevant, however this particular test doesn’t give me much hope. The keywords in the ad group I was targeting were related to the sale of saxophone instruments. The search query Google showed my ad for was, ‘tenor sax solos’, which is related yes, but not something we sell, therefore irrelevant.
If you do have automatic matching enabled in your account, you can view the actual search query that displayed your ad and view stats on that particular search query.
Simply go to the reports section in your Adwords account. Create a search query report and select the specific campaign in which you have automatic matching set up for. Once the report downloads, the column titled ‘search query match type’ will display any search query for the automatic matching simply labeled, ‘automatic’.
I questioned after running the test for a full week ,why I hadn’t received much traffic since I had my daily budget set to $500 when I normally only spend about $130 a day. I turned to the Google help section about the new automatic matching and read the following on why I hadn’t received much traffic. They mentioned that if you recently enabled the new automatic matching the system actually takes a short period of time to evaluate your campaign before it begins targeted relevant (or irrelevant!) search queries. They also mention additional reasons why you may not be getting much traffic yet:
- Your campaigns already meet their daily budgets
- Your keywords already capture the majority of relevant traffic
- Our system is unable to access your website or to find significant text or content on your site
- Your ad groups have a small number of ads with little information
The Google help section also notes that: Automatic matching currently has no effect on campaigns that use position preference or preferred cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.
You can view a complete list of frequently asked questions about Google’s automatic matching.
My initial thoughts, it’s not going to be as big as we all thought it might be in terms of driving additional traffic, whether relevant or irrelevant. However, since I’ve only been running the automatic matching test for one week and haven’t received much traffic from it, I plan to write again on the test in a week or two.
What have been your experiences with this new Adwords feature so far?
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May 28th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Hello, I’m curious.
Have you tried to do placement targeting campaigns on blogs where people discuss saxophones or teach how to play saxophone?
We’ve used this approach in the past and the click rate was generally quite good… still the conversion is a challenge !
Converting someone that does not search is clearly a different game than converting a searcher
May 28th, 2008 at 9:43 am
According to my Google rep, while some accounts have been enabled with the new feature, it’s campaigns that are being automatically opted in and not the whole account. So in any given account (which is what happened to me) I had 10 campaigns automatically opted in and then 3 campaigns that weren’t.
To add to the fun, some the campaigns that had been opted in and were listed as “enabled” on the ad group level, did not have the opt out checkbox in advanced options like it should have.
In another client’s account a “Automatic Matching” link appeared on the campaign dashboard next to the “Edit Settings” link instead of being in the Advanced Options area.
So far it’s been nothing but a time wasting frustration.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:57 am
@ Dominic
I have not tried to add a placement targeted campaign to this account. It’s definitely worth looking into! Thanks for the tip!
@ Elizabeth
I haven’t heard that only some campaigns are automatically opted in and some aren’t, that’s pretty interesting. It’s definitely worth while to check all of your campaigns just in case. Thanks for reading!
May 28th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
So far we have seen the same types of results, However, with the automatic matches being given in the report the automatic matching system will be an excellent tool for discovering long-tail keywords and negative keyword phrases. Each new tool they come out with has some application to helping focus campaigns. The biggest possibility seems to be the chance to discover terms you never would have thought of, and therefor never researched.
May 28th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Hi Randall, I absolutely agree that the reporting feature can help you determine additional keywords and negatives. That may be the only bonus! ( : Thanks for reading!
May 28th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
A competitor was using this system when our trademarked name came up as his text link…. a called the competitor who was buying our name as a paid search term.. but he didn’t know auto matching was going to pop our trademark as the actual text link…
oops
May 30th, 2008 at 12:42 am
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May 30th, 2008 at 9:00 am
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June 6th, 2008 at 8:40 am
I have had automatic matching on for over a week now and the account has not received any additional clicks. I know its possible to miss search terms when setting up campaigns but I purposely miss the non-targeted terms because they usually don’t convert. If the auto-matching would match to long-tail niche search terms then it could possibly be ok…if they were even quality long-tail terms. It could also be possibly useful if all I wanted to do was drive traffic and not receive conversions…If it can even receive a click! I agree about the reporting feature as it could help discover keywords if auto-match actually would drive additional traffic. Do you think auto-matching overwrites the negative keywords?
June 11th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Hi Brett, I don’t think auto-matching overwrites the negative keywords. I think it just may find additional terms you can add as negatives if need be.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:13 am
[...] To see some great screen shots inside an account included in the Automatic matching Beta test, go check out Amber’s post titled “Google Automatic Matching Test Only Generated 1 Click!“ [...]