People aren’t perfect spellers or typists. In fact, at least 7% of Google searches contain a misspelling. And the longer the query, the greater the likelihood of a typo. But even if what they’ve typed isn’t perfect, people still want to connect with the businesses, products, and services they’re trying to find.

Whether it’s “kid scooters”, “kid’s scooter”, or “kids scooters”, people interested in buying a scooter for their child want to see the most relevant ads despite slight variations in their search query. That’s why starting in late September, we’re applying close variant keyword matching, an intuitive way to connect people with the businesses they’re searching for, to all exact and phrase match keywords.

A successful match

Since it was introduced in 2012, advertisers have seen strong results. In fact, a vast majority of you are already matching to close keyword variations, receiving an average of 7% more exact and phrase match clicks with comparable clickthrough and conversion rates. In addition to increased keyword coverage, these incremental clicks represent valuable opportunities that are missed by "Low search volume" keywords, common for misspellings and abbreviations.

Below are just a few success stories advertisers have shared with us:

Shopify - "We’re passionate about achieving high efficiency, high impact, and high relevance with our customers. Having our keywords match to close variations allows us to do exactly that. Additional matches like "online shopping" to the keyword "online shop" resulted in a 100% increase in relevant clicks across exact and phrase match keywords--with cost per click remaining steady. What‘s more, we‘ve gained valuable time savings since manually adding misspelled keywords to our campaigns is now unnecessary."

Underground Elephant - “We’re always looking to increase the reach of our clients and ensure their customers can find them when searching online. So, expanding keywords to match close variants across our clients‘ accounts was a no-brainer. Since implementing this feature with one particular client, we’ve seen exact match keyword clicks in their account increase by 150%, with these additional clicks costing 10% less.”

Stitch America - “In matching common stemming variants such as "custom hats" for "customized hats", we’ve seen five times as many clicks for exact and phrase match keywords. What‘s more impressive is that this additional traffic costs half as much.”

Reach more customers

Starting in late September, we’re applying close variant keyword matching to all exact and phrase match keywords. Because close variant matching was already the default setting for campaigns, most of you won’t see a change in your keyword matching behavior. For advertisers that opted out, the option to disable close variants will be removed in September. Your exact and phrase match keywords will then begin matching to close keyword variations, allowing you to reach more of your potential customers with the right ad while aiming to lower cost per click and improve clickthrough rate.

Control with less complexity

With this update, you no longer have to build exhaustive lists of misspelled, abbreviated, and other close variations of your keywords to get the coverage you want. Instead, focus on adding negative keywords--including close variants you don’t want to match for--to shape traffic and reduce cost. This can improve your campaigns’ ROI and help deliver a better ad experience for your customers. You can learn more about the benefits of negative keywords in our new keyword white paper.

Keep in mind that the AdWords system prefers to trigger ads using keywords that are identical to search queries, so you can still use misspelled, abbreviated, and other close variations of your keywords. If you find that performance varies significantly between close variants, you can add the better performing ones as separate keywords and adjust their bids accordingly.