• StraightUpSearch, Friday, February 29, 2008 1:15 PM

This week Google invited a select group of AdWords advertisers to participate in beta testing of a feature called Automatic Matching, which takes campaign budget surplus and uses it to serve ads for queries that the marketer may have missed out on. The giant will crawl each advertiser's Web site for keywords and analyze their overall campaigns to find new, relevant queries "that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion on your site," said the official notice.

Not so fast, says Mike Koper. "If relevance is the name of the game then I don't think a new feature like Automatic Matching, which will spend an advertiser's surplus budget by making educated guesses about what a searcher may be looking for, keeps inline with improving click quality."

Koper says that the new feature could actually burn up that surplus on clicks that may or may not actually be relevant--and for clients with thousands of keywords, those unqualified clicks can make the difference between paid search being a cost-effective strategy and one that's bloated and inefficient. Search marketers spend hours and even days coming up with highly targeted keyword lists--and now they should trust Google's algorithm to select better keywords for them?

Read the whole story at StraightUpSearch »