From September, Google has decided that Adwords campaigns will no longer be able to add close variants to their keywords.

This has the benefit of allowing Google to cast the net wider in terms of bidding on keywords as businesses will have to add extra keywords manually to their campaign, including separate keywords for pluralisation and misspellings.

Adwords campaigns currently include the close variants option by default, although this can be switched off to give you more control over your budget and where your ads are being placed. The majority of campaigns switch the close variants function off because of this.

However those that don’t will no longer be able to rely on Google doing the work for them. Close variants allowed words that matched closely to your keyword, or were misspelled, showed an ad on the landing page. You could pick and choose which close variants you wanted on your ad campaign, giving you complete control over where your ads appeared.

A good example is kids clothings. If you keyword is ‘kids clothing’ then a few close variants would be: ‘kid clothing’, ‘kids clothes’, ‘kids cloths’ or ‘kids cl othing’. Close variants allowed you to choose which of these you wanted to include. Some of them would be completely different to your product, ‘kids cloths’ could mean the user was searching for wash cloths or something similar, which would not be an effective use of your ad.

The removal of this tool means that if you want close variants in your ad campaign you have to add them yourself into your keywords. This could be difficult when it comes to estimating common misspellings and variants, but should also give you some control over your ads, albeit not as much as previously.

This will take some getting used to for fans of close variants, especially when considering overlapping keywords and the size of your budget, but the changes should give you more accurate conversions once you have figured out how to configure the campaign.