Google Ads Changes: What you need to know

I guess Google didn’t want us to get too comfortable as we settle into 2021. Businesses running Google Ads got an email last week that announced that Google’s phasing out support of Broad Match Modified (BMM) keywords. “What’s that?” and “now what?” were common questions in my mailbox shortly after.

The short answer is, if you have any terms in your keywords lists that have a “+” in front of them, this affects you. The longer answer is, there’s time to address this and this will ultimately be a good change.

Here’s Google’s 30,000 feet explanation:

Basically, phrase match, which used to be leveraged to only trigger ads when the entire phrase was used in the order it appears in your keywords list, is now ‘smarter’, anticipating the intent of the searcher and delivering your ad when it deems it a match. We used to add broad match modifiers to capture these types of searches that weren’t phrased exactly as we’d phrase them, but still capture those searchers who are looking for our offerings. Now that’s covered in one match type: the updated phrase match.

If this is all confusing and you want someone to take a peek at your campaigns to see if you need any modifications, send us a message

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