Late Wednesday (26th June 2024), Google Ads announced some changes to the platform and for the first time in a while the changes are both significant and positive.

The changes relate to query matching in Google Ads and grant advertisers additional powers to improve matching and gain improved insight regarding visibility on search term reports, which over the last couple of years have been a point of contention for advertisers.

The first of the changes relates to brand campaigns via a relatively new addition called ‘Brand Inclusions’. Announced nearly exactly a year ago, Brand Inclusions exclusively sit within broad match campaigns and help refine smart bidding’s breadth of search terms it can match to by limiting the scope to only brands which you include within campaign settings. Google have rolled out recommended brands to add within the recommendations tab within Google Ads. Just be careful though, the option is only available for broad match campaigns, so if you apply the setting it will automatically turn on the broad match campaign setting and update the match types within the campaign.

A little before that, Google announced Brand Exclusions for Performance Max. They are now expanding that feature to cover all keyword match types in addition to dynamic search ad (DSA) campaigns, which comes as a nice addition and another way for advertisers to better control query matching. Use this during setup to ensure that DSA campaigns are only matching to brands you’re comfortable with, thus ensuring you’re being as efficient as possible.

The final point in the announcement regarding improved matching is that negative keywords can now identify and block misspells of queries, which is a complete godsend to advertisers. Instead of tediously adding in a near unlimited number of misspells (Google themselves note that there apparently is somehow 1.5 million ways to misspell ‘YouTube’), only a single negative will now need added to comprehensively prevent a specific term from showing.

Moving onto the increased visibility changes, Google have announced that now up to 9% more search terms which previous fell under the ‘Other’ grouping will be available to be reviewed in search term reports. It is worth noting that these 'new' terms will be misspells of other terms which are already available and with the aforementioned update on how negative keywords will work (e.g. blocking misspells), the impact and efficiency gains of the change is welcomed, but likely redundant with good account upkeep.

To summarise:

• Brand Inclusions are now in place for Broad Match Campaigns
• Brand Exclusions are now in place for all match types & DSA campaigns.
• Negative keywords now cover and block misspells
• Increased visibility across search term reports.

For more information, including some examples of how these changes will impact your account, check out Google’s blog here and be sure to implement some of these great changes in your accounts over the coming days and weeks.

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