OK, this is interesting in theory. But can Google make this work in a real world environment? I think that over time they might. And frankly, they ought to regardless.

Depending on broad match or phrase match to get listed on Google? A new tweak to Google AdWords means that in some cases, that might no longer get your ad listed as in the past.

Ads quality and you from the Inside AdWords blog from Google covers the change. For queries that are less commercial in nature, broad matching is becoming more conservative, less likely to put some advertisers on Google’s search results pages.

The upshot for users, Google says, is less likelihood of getting irrelevant ads. For advertisers, it means that for those ads where you absolutely, positively want to show up, exact match is the way to go.

What about commercially-oriented queries? In those cases, broad match will continue to work as before, helping more advertisers show up. In fact, now it might help more ads appear for terms they might not have shown up for in the past, if the query is deemed commercial in nature.

Google’s blog post says that broad match will show “more” ads for commercial queries, but that’s “more” relative to the more conservative broad matching being done for non-commercial queries.

It’s also important to note that the overall number of ads space on Google is not changing (they’ll remain at a maximum of 11). I’d blogged earlier that this sounded like it would be the case. Google says definitely not. I’ve updated my earlier article on the change to reflect that, making it now into just and update on the number of ads that all search engines show. Source: Search Engine Watch