With the start of the shortest month of the year, Google announced big changes for their keyword matching behavior. Namely, Broad Match Modified is going away and all of those capabilities will now be included under Phrase Match. As a refresher, BMM (denoted with +) included the keywords and/or close variations. Your Ads would show if all of the terms in your keywords (and related) were in the search query. For example, if your keywords were +blue +bike +girl, your Ad would show for the query “Blue Bicycles for Sporty Girls” because each term (concept) was present. Phrase Match (denoted by “”), on the other hand, would match your Ad to a query if your keywords (or related) matched the set inside the quotes. There could be no extra words in the query, unless they were before or after the quoted terms.
Now however, Phrase Match will incorporate all of these matching behaviors, meaning all of the keywords must be present in the query, but extra words are allowed in between. This also means that word order, with respect to meaning, will be taken into account.
What does this mean for you? The change won’t be fully implemented until July 2021, and you don’t need to take any action. It should be noted that by July 2021, you cannot create new BMM terms, but your current BMM terms will just follow the new behavior. You might see an increase in traffic for your Phrase Match terms, and likewise, a decrease in volume for your BMM terms. It is recommended that you monitor your performance and you could add more Broad Match terms or more Phrase Match terms in order to offset the possibility of decreased traffic.
