Within the coming months, Google intends to expand close variant matching with rewording and reordering for exact match Keywords.
This means if you bid on a keyword like “running shoes”, your ads may still show up when someone searches for a close variant like “shoes for running”.
Google believes this will benefit advertisers by preventing them from having to create large lists of keywords, a process which many advertisers find difficult according to the company’s internal data.
Google’s data also shows that advertisers can expect to see up to an average of 3% more exact match clicks when this change rolls out for English and Spanish Keywords later this year.
As part of this change, Google will ignore function words such as prepositions (in, to), conjunctions (but, for), articles (a, the), and other types of words that Google says do not impact the intent behind the query.
Examples of Ignoring Function Words
Removing the word “in” from a query like “hotels in Toronto” doesn’t change the intent behind the query, therefore it can safely be ignored.
However, Google would not remove the word “from” in a query like “flights from Toronto” because the intent behind the query is not the same as the intent behind a query like “flights to Toronto”.
Google provides further examples in the chart below:
Examples of Reordering Queries
In keeping with the same example I used above, queries like “hotels Toronto” and “Toronto hotels” essentially have the same meaning behind them despite the words behind reordered.
Exact match queries will match multiple queries that share the same meaning, even when the words are in a different order, as long as the user intent is believed to be the same.
Google says its reordering of queries will not add words to keywords in an advertiser’s list, it will only match reordered keywords with queries where the meaning behind the keywords in the same.
Google provides further examples in the chart below:
Google adds that AdWords will still default to using keywords identical to search queries. Phrase match keywords aren’t included in this update.
