A nice new match type in Google AdWords called ‘Broad Match Modifier’ was launched in the UK this week.

Basically, it turns ‘broad match’ into something that is a lot more usable and less at the whim of what Google consider a ‘good’ match for your keyword.

With the new (ish) ‘search query’ reporting you can now get, using broad match has become a little more usable with the ability to modify (or turn off) the extent of your broad match keywords, after maybe using it during some of the initial stages of a campaign. This enables you to get ‘real’ keyword data with the ‘search query’ report and then use this to go after worthwhile AdGroups, etc.

However, some of the ‘broad’ match keyword grouping is somewhat dodgy and even the most scientific use of the match type always left me feeling a bit like I was donating money, relevancy and shedding quality.

Well, the ‘Broad Match Modifier’ really does help in many respects… how does it work? Well, you need to put a ‘+’ sign before one of your broad match words to ‘modify’ it. By modifying it, Google means that it will treat that word somewhat less broad than it used to. Here’s an examples…

The keywords ‘glass desks’ would result in:

* Broad match will probably show for ‘perspex desk’, ‘desk’, ‘black glass descs’, ‘writing table’ etc.
* The modified match ‘glass +desk’ would match all the above apart from ‘writing table’ (yes, including the misspelling and pluralising of ‘desk’
* The modified match ‘+glass +desk’ would match the words ‘glass desk’ (and misspelling and pluralisation) within a sentance e.g. ‘black glas desks’, ‘glass desks’, etc.

Both ‘exact’ and ‘phrase’ matching are not affected and still work in the normal way.

All in all a good addition to the AdWords PPC tool kit and will save a good amount of time and wastage it you need to use broad match for any set of keywords for a specific campaign.

Yes, indeed it has. Wow, was it really September the last time I posted? Tut, tut…

There are many and a multitude of excuses, ranging from busy to well… busy. But as I always say, if you are not going to update your blog, don’t have one!

Even worse is that I went to the trouble to get a (lovely) new theme done a few weeks ago and yet still (until today) have not updated the blog or informed anyone that I now have sheep (count them!) in my blog design. This occurred to me to be ‘procrastination on speed’ (copyright R Andrews 2010), if that is not too much of an oxymoron. As all my teachers used to say ‘Robert must try harder’. Point noted…

I must thank Dan from Baltic (http://balticblogdesign.com) for the creative inspiration for the wonderful new theme. You are a top man and I would recommend your services to everyone.

So, new day, new dawn and all that. I will add some proper pages to the blog that outline a little more of the services I can offer. I have not done much of the consultancy/training side for a while and I miss it a bit. I have been too wrapped up in some of my affiliate sites and I need to get out more…

Baa, baa…