Mike The Internet Guy’s Blog

Recently Google rolled out the Search Query performance report which showed other keywords your broad and phrase matched terms were generating impressions for. Well what do you know….. people started seeing what crap their ads were showing up on which I am sure prompted the smart ones to stop using broad match or at least add some negative keywords. My inital reaction was great, this is a really useful tool that not only helps me improve my ROI (keep customer happy) it also improves quality for Google.

So what does Google go and do but turn it off! Thats right folks these queries are not visible in the reports anymore and any report that you previously generated is gone from your account!! Now we all know that broad match can really get you in trouble mostly due to crappy technology which shows someone’s ad for ’summit county kitchens’ when the broad matched term was ’summit county homes’ (using a ton of negatives I might add, though of course kitchen was not one of them!) If you don’t know what I am talking about go see Rich from Apogee.

This is the second useful tool I have noticed removed by Google this week, that could really help improve campaign performance for Google’s customers and improve quality across the network. What is the deal. Did these tools really impact revenue, or was there a different reason for turning these tools off such as a competitor being able to reverse engineer some of the matching algorithms. I guess we’ll never know for sure, but I do know I would like to see these tools come back, and may even be willing to PAY a premium for this access!

Share This