Google ads is going to be recommending to advertisers to switch or supplement some of their search ad campaigns to use broad match with its Smart Bidding. Google wrote “using broad match and Smart Bidding together can help you reach more relevant queries that meet your performance objectives.”

I am not surprised that Google would recommend this but I am surprised, a bit, that Ginny Marvin thinks you should give it a try and see what happens. She said “like it or not, this is where Google Ads paid search is heading. This is a radical shift anyone who’s been managing paid search campaigns for any length of time, but in this way it’s becoming much more like paid social where we are more accustomed to loosening the reigns and segmenting less to let the algorithms run and learn.”

Google’s example is “a broad match keyword like women’s hats could match to relevant queries you may not have thought of, like winter headwear for women or women’s accessories. By pairing this keyword with Smart Bidding, you can use auction-time signals to set the right bid for each of these queries. This means that you no longer need to anticipate and manage every potential search.” Google said if you are using Smart Bidding, Google will “identify existing keywords that are likely to improve performance if you switch them to broad match.”

Google will begin automatically surface these opportunities to you on the Recommendations page in your account, so be on the look out for it. Google said “on average, advertisers that switch their phrase match and broad match modified keywords to broad match can see more conversions and a higher conversion value.”

Here is some of the chatter around this:

As these people and Ginny did point out, Google is hiding some search data and should we trust them?

Forum discussion at Twitter.