Adiós, Exact Match. That’s the official word from search giant Bing. A true exact match will soon be relegated to oblivion. Bing will add Close Variants to all its advertising campaigns beginning May 21^st. There are other imminent changes as well and they will impact negative keywords. So advertisers using Bing beware: check out these new changes.

Close variants – keywords with misspellings, grammatical variations, abbreviations, plurals, spacing, and other such close iterations of existing keywords in a campaign – will save time for advertisers while giving them a bigger net to successfully reach out to users inputting keywords in their search queries.

Example:

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While zeroing in on close variants, Bing will adhere at all times to high relevancy thresholds – this, according to a company statement. By mining close variants from a large pool of qualified sourcing, Bing adds more credibility to search results. Based on metrics from select accounts in the United States where the changes had been implemented last fall, Bing claims that close variants will help drive highly qualified click volumes to campaigns. The select accounts saw an impressive 2-3% rise in click volumes.

New advertisers on Bing will not have to come up with long lists of exact match terms, a true benefit. But advertisers accustomed to laser-targeted spending and reporting metrics may feel some pain from the changes.

Also on board, negatives will no longer supersede targeted keywords. There will no longer be “true blocking” for across the board negative terms.

Example:

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Advertisers will have to remove all terms at the keyword level for which they do not wish ads to be triggered. But Bing shall provide a negative keyword conflict report to discover troublesome keywords and then either pause or remove them.