Heads Up - Exact Match on Cities no longer exact.

[pbarnhart]

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.

 

[JoyHawkins]

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"?

 

[pbarnhart]

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.

 

[pbarnhart]

Well, we are getting refunds for the mismatched city clicks (about 20), so I don't know if this was error. But we are going to watch this a lot more closely.