Pittsburgh Internet Consulting SEO Blog

From being a political junkie, I know that you release things you don’t want people to cover right before a long weekend. Just this last weekend, John McCain did this with his medical records. In the search engine world, Google Ad Words announced it’s “Automatic Matching” which will begin on June 3rd with an e-mail Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend.

The first line of the explanation reads “Automatic matching shows your ads on relevant search queries not already captured by your keywords. ” In other words, we at Google will now decide when to spend your money instead of you. The spin that Google puts on the e-mail notification they sent out is that the goal of the program is to keep your cost per click and click through rate on these queries in line with the keywords you have signed up for. BUT THE REAL GOAL is to help Google’s bottom line.

Many Ad Words advertisers are not that savvy when it comes to running their accounts. This policy will effectively increase Google’s revenue immediately beginning June 3rd as a result of being able to show ads for keywords nobody has signed up for. Expect their 3rd quarter advertising revenues to go up significantly. By automatically opting all client into this campaign, many advertisers will be unaware that they are now spending on keywords THEY DID NOT SIGN UP FOR.

If this policy was to improve accounts and not to improve revenue, then it would be something you could opt IN to, not opt OUT of. If the major benefits were for the customer, then the e-mail notification would have announced the great new feature and tried to get people to sign up for the beta. By doing it the other way, Google shows themselves to be no better than the competition they hate so much. So much for point number six in their company philosophy page, “You can make money without doing evil.”

Today we are opting out of this program for 100% of our client base. If they had allowed us to choose to opt-in, we would have tried it on a couple clients. To read more about this from Google, here is the FAQ on their Automatic Matching Option. Go here if you want to opt out of Google’s automatic matching.