More threads by pbarnhart

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We've monitored a trend of Google aggressively matching local terms under exact match. This is true both for keyword + zipcode and keyword + city. The matches are also using some level of travel path - two adjacent smaller towns along a major thoroghfare are now matching in exact match, but two adjacent smaller towns with a natural or man-made traffic barrier (for example, an interstate or a large river in the case of the Austin area) will not.

For example, these two exact match keywords are now redundant, and this is confirmed in our keyword-to-search query report. Redundant matching started about 30 days ago. This is not limited to small towns - we started seeing redundancy in (this is Arlington, TX BTW) [keyword+arlington] and [keyword+dallas] last weekend.

Solution - keep geo modifiers in separate ad groups AND use them as negatives in the other ad groups.
 
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Wait so you're saying hypothetically if you were to put [dog boarding dallas] in your account it would show up for a search on Google for "dog boarding arlington tx"?
 
Adding the "tx" appears to prevent the match according to what we are seeing. Cannot duplicate in the preview testing tool. What we have is several matches where:

search term "dog board 55555" matches [dog boarding metropolis] as a close variant

and a couple that are:

search term "dog boarding arlington" matches [dog boarding dallas] as a close variant.

These are all mobile matches with "get location details" clicks, so I am assuming they are all map ads.

These only represent an extremely small number of our total exact match searches, and I've opened a ticket with Google on it.
 

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