Google has said that the reason for this recommendation is to consolidate keywords and free up advertisers’ time to manage their accounts at a more strategic level, rather than getting bogged down in the detail.

However, even though great strides have been made in Google’s semantic algorithms and broad match traffic has improved greatly over the years, we are still seeing broad match appear for searches that aren’t relevant or are more costly for the advertiser.

Furthermore, this directly impacts ad copy and ads that may have been specifically curated to appeal to a specific aspect of the keyword, including the landing page, which may not translate effectively to a synonym, and, in turn, result in a poorer user experience.

We have seen significant differences in performance between match types, with conversion rates and traffic quality of broad match terms (and close variants) often significantly less effective than exact match or phrase match. Taking away control of match types from advertisers and giving it to an algorithm could result in:

• Higher volume but lower quality searches

• Increased media spend from increased CPCs as the search and competitor pool expands

• Less tailored user experience and therefore lower conversion

Disabling this recommendation’s auto-apply settings will enable the advertiser to manually review the performance between similar keywords and make an informed decision over whether to pause the keyword or not based on performance analysis, including trialling the changes as part of an A/B test.