Close Variants & Bad Data - Why Marketers Concerned With Google Ads Removing Search Terms | From MOT

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[Music] i would like to start with what is in my opinion the most egregious so we have a piece of confirmed news i saw this first shared by rachel at ppc rachel on twitter on wednesday september 2nd and she had this notification in google ads that we all woke up to that morning and it says changes to the search terms report we are updating the search terms report to only include terms that were searched by a significant number of users as a result you may see fewer terms in your search terms report going forward so we've all had some time to process this by this point um but i will start with you julie why do you think this is such a hot topic in the ppc community and what are people saying people are saying a lot i mean i was involved in in you know back and forth twitter discussion up until i was like getting ready to do this um there's a lot of there are a lot of opinions about it i mean google clarified a little bit after the sort of initial news broke that they're doing this they're saying that they're doing it for for privacy um i've thoughts on that but in in general i think less data especially for paying advertisers is never really a great thing so i i have concerns about this especially for smaller advertisers who have smaller budgets and who have lower lower search volume where you may have a decent number of terms that could hit this sort of ill-defined threshold right like what is significant nobody knows so it has the potential to be really problematic for advertisers of all sizes if you can't see those terms and negative out the ones you don't want definitely and a big part of this that people are talking about is this comes not i don't want to say on the heels but it comes after we've already been dealing with close variants in our accounts for so long so mark how do you think this news kind of meshes with the world of close variance and how do you see it coinciding yeah so you know i've been very vocal about how i feel about close variant matching i've been getting crazy crazy things so the other day i had one and the keyword it's for a manufacturing software the keyword we're bidding on is electronic logbook and the close variant match that we saw in the search terms report that had one click was not great it was epstein's logbook that is insane and that only got one click so it would not appear in the search terms report moving forward but that one click could have had a very damaging impact on this brand they are one of the leaders in manufacturing technology right now and if that one person screenshots that it just doesn't it's not a good luck to be appearing next to news about epstein and we had no idea if that like in the future like that could happen and we'd have no idea that it happened and that we're driving traffic from epstein like that is crazy and just to think about like how many other small queries that are terrible close variant matches for like manufacturing productivity software we had like or no the term the keyword was um production tracking software and it matched to produce tracking software and generated two clicks like that was something that also and it's like these things are crazy and there's going to be so many of these things that we won't have a chance to negative out so i think the big thing is that in order to get that volume to be able to see them to whatever this mysterious significant number is like we're going to be looking at negative keywords like looking at search terms over a much longer period of time than we normally would so that it reaches that volume threshold it's crazy how much we have to spend on these bad matches before we're able to see them totally and i just want to say because andre and julie you're not always on the show i laugh sometimes so i can avoid crying because that was just a terrible story and i'm like laughing to it which is crazy but yeah that's like a compliance issue and a legal problem and something that our clients are going to want to know about imagine also if you were using dynamic keyword insertion for those queries and just just imagine the the realm of possibilities that we could be talking here about that is such a good point yeah the things that could show up in your ads that's really you won't be able to see it because you don't know it's happening because you don't have the visibility anymore it's that combo i think it's that combo of the continued fuzzying up of the matches and then taking away sort of this layer of visibility or protection that you know i mean i've already over the last year been spending way more time in queer reports and then putting negatives in um because it's been necessary the way that the the terms match now um just not uh not being able to see a lot of that it just it gives me a lot of you know a lot of concern i mean you know i am concerned about this i know not everybody shares that you know shares that opinion right now um but until this gets clarified in a way that makes me feel more comfortable on its face right now it's it's pretty concerning particularly for that reason definitely like what you saw of course you did if you're looking for more marketing and clock releases new episodes every friday with digital marketing news of the week you can subscribe wherever you consume your