Best rip off the band aid: Broad Match Modifier is being retired. On the bright side, Phrase Match might be good again. To quote Google’s announcement today, titled “Important: Updates to phrase and broad match modified keywords“:

“In July, once the new behavior has been rolled out globally, you’ll no longer be able to create new broad match modifier keywords.”

— Google, 4th Feb 2021

What new behaviour are they talking about? Read on. I’ll sort you out.

In January, we did a podcast on whether we thought automation was the future of Google Ads. We pretty much agreed that, rightly or wrongly, it was. We also conceded that it’s not all bad. That’s the way Facebook have run things since day one, and it’s still possible to be good or bad at that. Google want the same system, and the only way to get there is to take away the settings and tools we’ve all gotten used to. It sucks, but it’s not the collapse of our industry people think it’ll be.

And so, Google’s latest “improvement” to the ad platform removes another setting, and this time it’s a big one: they’re splicing the phrase and modified broad match types, so that BMM can be retired by the summer.

We’ve lost search terms, we’ve had campaign and audience types bundled together, we’ve had the black boxes of Smart Shopping (I still love you) and App Campaigns, and now, at long last, we’ve lost a match type. Yikes.

When you look at what the changes actually mean, it’s a true hybridisation of the two existing match types. Previously;

  • Phrase match was for when you wanted queries containing those words in that exact order, nothing in between. But literally anything could appear on either side.

    “Google ads agency” would match ‘who is the best google ads agency’ or ‘google ads agency newcastle’ but it wouldn’t match ‘google ads management agency’ thanks to a word in the middle, and it wouldn’t match ‘ppc agency google ads’ because our words are in a mixed-up order. Clear enough?

  • BMM was for when you wanted queries with all the words you specify, even with other stuff in between, with no respect for word order whatsoever.

    +google +ads +agency would match all of the above queries, but also ‘do I need an agency to run ads on google’ because all the words are in there somewhere. It’s more flexible, but also less precise.

The Shiny New Phrase Match(™ Joe@BFBC) is going to respect the order of words but allow for gaps in between them, so our previous ‘google ads management agency’ would show up now. Great, right? That’s a relevant query and now we can show ads on it without making our accounts bigger and more complex. Honestly, in many ways this is a bit of a win. We’re losing the old style phrase match, but it was getting a bit long in the tooth anyway. And if I counted the number of times I’d wished I could make BMM respect the order of certain words, but still allow other words in between, I’d be here all day.

Here’s a helpful explainer image I’ve stolen from Google. They just stole one of my match types so my karma is balanced.

Imagine you run a courier service so you want ‘newcastle to london’ but not ‘london to newcastle’ because you can’t service those people. Before, using +newcastle +to +london would trigger both. Disaster. That means you’ve got to use phrase match, and if you want to trigger ads for ‘newcastle to central london’ you’d need a new keyword since that word ‘central’ will stop the ads being triggered by your existing keyword. Messy.

Now, you only need one keyword for that. Best of both. I love it. Get all the relevant searches, only in the direction of travel you’re actually going. Plenty of other industries exist where this will be great.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though because the change isn’t without caveats; two pretty serious ones jumped out at me.

First off, the gap between pure broad keywords and everything else is now massive. Losing BMM means you go from the clever new phrase match with rules about word order to “things that vaguely mean what I typed”, which is a genuine non-cynical look at broad match in 2021. Don’t get me wrong, those broad keywords are getting really good at matching only the right stuff and if you automate your bids (shock) it gets even better. Some of my top performers have one or two campaigns set up that way. But if you want just a little bit more and you’re trying to stay manual, life’s about to get harder. Which is what Google want. The sooner we give them a theme and a target cost per conversion or return on ad spend, the better for them. Which leads us onto our second something-to-watch-out-for.

Now that we’ve lost one match type, it’s only a matter of time before we lose another. Then we’ll be halfway to zero. Let’s not forget that “website + conversion event + performance target + credit card” is the magic formula Larry and Sergey have wanted for 20 years. This gets us very close. This is the beginning of a seismic shift in the way Google Ads is run, and if you’re still building SKAGs and crunching data in spreadsheets to see whether your bids should be £0.02 higher on keywords containing “t shirts” rather than “t shirt”, you’re going to have a very rough time adapting. The situation isn’t hopeless though; anything but.

I’ve said it a million times: the advertising greats of years gone by didn’t have targeting and keywords and bids. They had really fantastic writing ability, and a rock-solid understanding of who their customer was and what they wanted from a product. The best Google Ads managers already have this. The best Facebook Ads managers couldn’t survive without it either.

David Ogilvy wrote this ad in about 1960. It’s considered one of the greatest ever. Back then, match types had more to do with lighting a cigarette than running an ad campaign.

This kind of numbers-first, people-second marketing was always going to be a flash in the pan, and it looks like the flames are starting to die down. If we stick to what’s always worked and back it up with amazing 21st-century measurement and analytics, we can do it even better and still have an edge over our competitors. The only people under threat are the amateurs. If you’re reading this, you care about running great ads. Or you have a team for that specific purpose. Or maybe you’d like one.

The old ways are dying out. But the even older ways are timeless, and this will put them back in the spotlight. Best of all, the best practices are tried-and-tested for us already. All we have to do is keep up, and keep controlling what we can while the buttons still exist for us to press.