Break out your Google-hosen, Adwords speaks German. Today I am impressed/worried about how smart broad match is becoming. I was reviewing a Search Query Report when I can across this: “arbeit von zu hause.” I might have been a linguist in a past life, but I’m not bidding on German keywords in this campaign.
It’s fair to say that broad matching isn’t the most beloved Adwords feature for a lot of Search Marketers. Personally I kind of like broad match, it is not without purpose. I find it inspirational. You can get a clearer view of how people really search… the creativity of the general public with a blank search box is not to be underestimated. It helps me find good new keywords and lots of negative keywords too. Plus I think you’re pretty conceited if you believe you can sit in your office and conjure up every possible combination of words that will drive profitable traffic to your web site.
On the one hand I’m impressed that Google made a multilingual leap that was correct. It’s not like the phrase is off topic, it’s dead on, but how did Google put this together? Are they using translation software somewhere? Did somebody else bid on this in an ad group containing its English counterpart and Google connected the two…? I mean seriously, it’s another language. The organic results are all in German.
The part that I am worried about is what happens if they are making poor translations. English isn’t an easy language to start with, a lot of the meaning of words in our language and others is based on context. Does this mean in the future I’m going to have to translate half of my search query report and figure out if it’s good traffic? Are my negative keywords going to look like this: tton-i ap seo-yo, sa bai di mai, ta mina pengar…
Well I guess this is just one more thing for me to keep an eye on! At least it looks like being a quintilingual Military Intelligence analyst is going to pay off after all 🙂