Yes! It finally happened. Earlier this week, on July 14th, Google AdWords rolled out their new Broad Match Modifier (BMM) keyword matching option to all of their advertisers in the United States. Since BMM had previously only been available to AdWords advertisers in the UK and Canada, it’s release to US campaigns is something that has been eagerly awaited.

When AdWords first announced the new modified broad keyword matching, they released an infographic to help marketers visually understand how BMM works and relates to existing match types. The infographic shows a very small set of examples of keyword matches that you can expect to have your text ads displayed for.

New Pay Per Click Keyword Match Types

After spending a month running and analyzing modified broad match keywords in a few Canadian AdWords campaigns, we developed a few matching techniques and initial bidding strategies that are represented in the following infograph. We feel that this is a better representation of the tiered levels of match type bidding, traffic potential and keyword matching. In particular we have expanded upon the new BMM match types with 3 possible levels of matching that we call: “Anchor Modified Broad Match“, “Dual Anchor Modified Broad Match“, and “Fully Modified Broad Match“.

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During the a Search Engine Q&A session at the SMX East conference in New York this week, Yahoo officially announced that they have stopped supporting the meta keywords tag as an ranking factor in their web search algorithm. Yahoo was the last major search engine to openly admit that it was an element of their search ranking results.

But did they really quit supporting the keyword tag? Maybe not…
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Google recently added a new “Local Search Volume” metric to their AdWords Keyword Tool that provides additional keyword search data for the country that you are targeting.  This is a great feature for determining keyword versions for geographic targeting of campaigns.
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