Google has announced that it will be changing how they handle AdWords misspellings, using plurals and other discrepancies for keywords or phrases. Now in mid-May, Google will match close variations to phrases and keywords that may appear in search results. This will make things for users and for advertisers much easier.
While Google’s organic search results already offer this, it will now include AdWords results. The reason for the change is that 7% of all searches contain misspellings.
There are five different discrepancies in language that will be considered with the change: misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemming (adding ‘–ing’), accents, abbreviations and acronyms.
This will be beneficial, because every user has their own way of using keywords in searches and variations will now be considered. Businesses will still come up in searches that are related to their business even with this new change.
Google has actually been testing this recently and noticed that there was a 3% increase in search clicks with comparable CPCs, but they say that it will be different for each advertiser.
Advertisers and PPC management companies are able to opt out of this if they want more control over specific keywords by going to the “Advanced settings” tab and selecting “Keyword matching options.”