“I just called Google regarding this Automatic Matching feature. The Representative I spoke with advised that Automatic Matching is not going to be enabled when the new feature is launched. Originally it was set up like this, but the plans have changed. I am assuming that not too many clients were happy about this

Currently this feature is not available to the accounts that i manage however, it will be available in early June for everyone.”

Thanks for the update Melissa!

Tammy: The AM (automatic matching) option is within your campaign settings under “Advanced Options.” If you haven’t seen the account alert, then you probably haven’t been opted in yet. Here is the link to the Adwords Help Section entry on AM:
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=63323&hl=en_US

Andy Komack: You pose an interesting question about match types + long tail terms. Honestly, if you have all of these in your ad group, then I am actually interested to see what Google will pull out of their hat to automatically match your keywords! Sounds like you should have your bases (or at least relevant bases) covered!

Megan: Thanks for the comment!

Seo4: Thanks for the comment!

There is a way to show all these actual keywords if you’re using Google Analytics. It involves creating a new profile that appends the actual keywords to the keywords that you’ve loaded into Adwords campaigns. Instructions are on the ROI Revolution site:

http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2007/04/exact_keyword_tracking_with_google_analytics_revis.html

I’ve found this to be a rich data source that’s helped me add tons of negative keywords in Adwords campaigns, as well as discovering new terms.

Do you think that simply expanding a keyword set to include as many tail terms as possible, in tandem with using all 3 match types for each would make the need/desire to use Automatic Matching less desirable?

We spoke with Google about this issue recently and they said for some reason or another the keywords may not show in the report because there were not enough clicks generated by the keywords to warrant reporting them. When we asked them about a minimum number of clicks or impressions required they said that they could not provide use with a direct answer. Their final answer to us was this if they provided all the keywords in the Search Query report that were actually search for or clicked on it would take up too much bandwidth to generate the report and that it would take much longer to generate the report.

I don’t know about you or anyone else reading the blog, but I would rather have Google take longer to generate an accurate report in order to allow their advertisers to see what irrelevant keyword phrases may have been search for or clicked on. One irrelevant click is one click too many in our opinion, especially if it occurs potentially on 100s of unknown phrases. This can bleed even the savviest PPC advertisers’ wallets dry since they don’t have all the details.

We recently scrubbed through one of the search query reports for one of our SEO clients who said over the past month or so they felt like their click quality has eroded. In the report, we discovered over 900 unique keywords that Google would not release the identity of within the report. Something we should note here is although 900 keywords remained unknown to us. The keywords had very few clicks.

We were still concerned to say the least, since clicks cost our client an average of $2 a click (Ouch! With click costs like this we are glad to be an SEO company).

In addition the same report showed there were keywords that had only one 1 click and the keyword phrase was explicitly represented within in the report. Therefore, we are assuming the combination of low CTRs and bandwidth issues related to reporting effect the details of the report.

In order to receive accurate data and since a click saved on an irrelevant keyword is a click that could have been traded for a keyword that does work and convert. We would be willing to wait a little longer for Google to generate a report as vital as the search query report.

Anybody else feel that way?

What are some things you are doing to mitigate irrelevant clicks?