There may be a bug impacting some Google Ads advertiser accounts that will quietly switch your campaigns to have broad match turned on, even when that campaign may have used phrase or exact match. This can happen when you switch from non-conversion based bidding to a conversion based bidding strategy. When you make that switch, Google may turn on broad match, even if you did not have broad match set.
Note: This was found to be a campaign creation only mechanic, Navah clarified.
This bug was spotted by Navah Hopkins who posted about this issue on LinkedIn. She wrote, "When you switch from non-conversion based bidding (which is common for newer campaigns) to a conversion based bidding strategy, Google automatically toggles Broad Match campaigns on. This means your keywords that you took the time to add as phrase or exact will be converted to Broad match."
Later she confirmed that this is impacting some accounts and not all.
Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, replied on LinkedIn saying, "That is not the expected behavior when switching from manual bidding to a Smart Bidding strategy. The team is investigating this issue."
Google has not fully confirmed the issue but did confirm this should not be happening.
This is just a heads up to any of you who may have made these changes to their campaigns, to double check the other settings that you did not intend to change with it.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
