http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/adwords-new-automatic-matching-dont-fall-for-this Just seen this, sounds worse than broad matching. PPBC
good catch PPCB, always a pleasure. I pay close attention to anything new in the adwords world, cause one change could mean a huge disaster if I don't catch it in time. Hopefully this stays beta and doesn't get realised. Keep My Fingers Crossed
Wow... "...Automatic Matching automatically extends your campaign's reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists..." That is pretty bad... at least for most marketers !
As long as you can turn it off it'll probably work out well for those of us who are paying attention ie we'll turn it off and our competitors will leave it on and bleed their accounts dry
The sales pitch using the term "surplus budget" - I don't know, but if I make a budget for something and the budget isn't fully used up, the actual money wouldn't be surplus to other financial requirements. In the case of adwords, a campaign budget would likely be the maximum revenue to risk for evaluating a campaign and definitely wouldn't want it wasted frivolously on relevant terms not already triggered by keyword lists. The whole point of people refining their keyword lists is they are getting rid of the ones that do not convert - so why would Google think that it would help improve ROI? Some of the relevant keywords not in a list might convert, however, if the person had already tried out the keyword and had dumped it for poor ROI, it is definitely not in the interests of adwords users. In the example posted in the link - an ad impression for 'Adidas Shoes' will be shown when someone searched for 'bedroom slippers' - definitely appears a very low chance of a conversion in that instance.
Google doesnt care about your ROI. They care about the guy who sets his daily budget to $100 but only generates enough clicks to spend $20-$40. They want that other $60-$80 he authorized.
I can understand that Google want to increase their ROI and try and package it as a favour for their adwords customers - under the 'do no evil' philosophy. However, the idea may be great for Google and may benefit some adwords users, but the majority of people will not be wanting to play that game otherwise they significantly increase the risk involved with lower overall ROI. Google are also making it where the destination url must match the display url (or something similar). This is more than likely the foundation step required to 'clean-up' adwords so less mistakes can be made when introducing the automatic matching.
hopefully it can be disabled, that is a load of crap. The illegitimate clicks without this feature are bad enough.