Google Redefines Phrase and Exact Match

I'm starting to feel that we are losing more & more control of campaign management while trading for ease of work, but at what cost? (CPC!)

Google Adwords has officially killed Exact Match and Phrase Match as we had known it. A few years ago, they introduced Modified Broad Match citing concerns from advertisers that the Broad Match was really, well, broad.

WordStream estimated that roughly 97% of Google AdWords advertisers are unaffected by the change, while the remaining 3% employing traditional exact and phrase match methods are expected to be impacted. For some reason, I don't believe that only 3% of the search managers were using exact and phrase matches in the so-called traditional manner. The removal of the optional feature seems unjustified.

Like the others out there, I'm very worried about the future of search marketing. Some advertisers and brands such as Jaeger-LeCoultre will be the most affected. For example, keywords such as "jagermeister", "jägerbomb" and "jäger" (meaning "hunter" in German) are already triggering the ads and causing the CPCs to increase by 3x. Now, as search campaign managers, we are going to be playing whack-a-mole with search terms and negative keywords for the rest of our lives.

The concept of exact match, which is about 15 years old, is giving way to a "keyword-less" future of search, where algorithms like Hummingbird present results without requiring the exact keywords. This shift suggests a trend toward further consolidation of match types in Google AdWords.