Research shows that 97% of website visitors do not convert the first time they visit. With this in mind, Google is now offering you a new way to re-market and re-engage with your potential customers and bring them back to your website.

Just days after introducing zip code targeting to Google AdWords, Google announced another set of changes to the AdWords property, this time an update that will improve matching behavior for keyword or phrase in search queries.

Following this update the traditional “keyword or phrase” and [exact] match rules will now include misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents, abbreviations and other variants.

According to Google:

Based on our research and testing, we believe these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.

People aren’t perfect spellers or typists. At least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling, and the longer the query, the higher the rate.

Advertisers who already have misspellings, variants, abbreviations, etc in their AdWords campaign will not be affected significantly by this change. However for those who do not have these variants already included; Google’s new Matching Behaviour could prove to be a beneficial tool to tap into the pool of potential traffic that might have gone unnoticed due to keyword misspellings, variants, and abbreviations usage.

Google warns that advertisers must be aware of two things:

1. The new “Matching Behavior” will be automatically activated and set as the default behavior to all AdWords accounts unless advertisers decide to ‘opt-out’ an option Google will offer to advertisers in this controlled feature. If you don’t want the potential for more clicks and prefer to maintain the current matching behavior in your campaign, you’ll still have that option. In the coming weeks, Google will begin rolling out controls which will allow you to adjust your keyword matching options. Once they’re live, log in to AdWords and select the campaign settings tab. Under “Advanced settings” select Keyword matching options”.
2. It is important, that advertisers are careful while assigning acronyms, misspellings (that are relevant to their ads) etc to their ad campaigns as it will have a direct impact on their ad performance and campaign budgets.

The actual matching won’t start until mid-May to give users a chance to opt out if they’d like.