On 14th August, 2014, Google announced "Starting in late September, we're applying close variant keyword matching .... to all exact and phrase match keywords." What this means is "All phrase and exact match keywords will begin matching close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents, acronyms and abbreviations."
If answer to any of the aforementioned questions is an unequivocal yes, read on.
The only solution known so far is to extensively use negative keywords. Understandably, this is a crude solution, but, by far, no one has come up with an alternative solution that is elegant and easy.
What it means, that if your exact match keyword is [blue widget], to block your ads from appearing variations, you have to add "widgets", "widgety", "widgetry", "widgeteer", "widgetery", "blued", "blueish", etc. as broad match negative keywords in that adgroup. Not the best or ideal solution, but this will soften the impact of the impending change.
Search Terms Report (earlier known as Search Query Report [SQR]) will provide you some ideas about which terms to block. You have to keep a close watch on the STR to see any offending term makings its way. Apart from this, you can also, proactively, block the variations of the keywords.
Yes, this is going to be excruciatingly painful and time consuming.
Our current product identifies negative keywords in an automated way. We process Search Terms Report (or should we continue call it SQR?) to identify campaign-level negatives.
To address the problem at hand, namely change in behavior of exact match, we are working on a brand new solution.
This solution will provide following benefits.
Save $$ with proactive blocking: Before you launch a new campaign, for the exact and phrase match keywords, we will provide you a list of terms that are variations of your keywords. You can select which of them you wish to add as negatives. What it means for you is that you don't waste a single dollar for these variations
Catch wasted ad spend early: We will keep a close watch on STR to see if there are any close variations being matched. You will come to know about these terms early.
Save tens of hours of manual work: We will provide you actionable data and make your decision-making as painless as possible. You will spend minimal amount of time on this active.
We plan to roll out the early version of this solution in a few weeks. This will be a limited roll out and available only for a select few users.
If you want to get back the exact and phrase match without the variations, join the list of beta users. We will let you know as soon as we open the doors for early users.
Update: We now have the exact match solution available. Go ahead and give it a try!