Ok there seems to be a bit of a panic in the Google ads community over this one, but I don’t think it is as bad as everyone thinks. If you are getting someone to manage your Google Ads get on to them and make sure they are aware of this as the update is happing in “Mid Feb” they were only announced on the 4th Feb ~ thanks Google.
Essentially the tool is going to combine phrase and broad modifier match keyword. So a phrased match keyword would be the same as a broad matched keyword kind of in theory.
So really quickly back to basics.
+adidas +running +shoes would historically trigger for a search query “what are the best running shoes from adidas ” all the terms “+adidas”, “+running” & “+shoes” are all in the search query.
Broad matched modifierd keywords are being replaced by phrase match keyword so after the update is complete the new the keyword in the account would now be “adidas running shoes”
There is an important line in the release “while continuing to respect word order when it’s important to the meaning”
SO in the above example the broad match modifier keyword: +adidas +running +shoes would historically trigger the search query “best running shoes from adidas” but a phrase match of the same terms “adidas running shoes” would not as the order of the terms is different. So if you simple just replace all your broad match modifier temrs with phrase match you are relying on Google to get it right
The linguistic skills of Google have certainly improved over the last few years but i am still not willing to trust the tool to get this right, so this is what we are going to do to resolve this for our clients is the following
Import all accounts into AdWords editor and export all of our broad match terms into excel convert them into phrase match by find and replacing all the “+” symbols for nothing then reimport them with the match type set to phrase. I am going to keep them in the same adgroups with the same bids to see how performance changes before playing with setting a priority by modifying bids
I am then going to split all multi term phrases into columns using the text to columns function in excel and recombine them in each possible variant
so a 3 keyword BMM terms with keyword 1, 2, 3, will get turning into phrase match in the following combinations
1st, 2nd, 3rd,
1st, 3rd, 2th,
etc
An easy way to check how many combinations you should have is to use factorials, probably one of this things back from maths class we all though you would never need in real
life
so 2! ie a two keyword search phrase will have 2 variants as 2! = 2 x 1 = 2
3! ie a 3 keyword search phrase will have 6 variants as 3! = 3 x 2 x 1 = 6
and so on an so forth.
Hope this helps