On Thursday August 14th Google made an announcement stating that exact match keywords are no longer an essential part of the overall campaign. This has had a tremendous effect on close variant keyword matching, which initially gave advertisers the option, will now become a requirement as of September 2014.
How will this Change Affect Adwords?
In the past, if advertisers bid on exact match keywords, their ads would only show up if someone searched word for word what the keywords were. Google is changing the way this is structured by applying close variant keyword matching to exact match keywords, essentially showing ads with the exact keywords, but, variations of the words such as misspellings, acronyms, singular and plural words, and abbreviations.
How this will affect you?
When the update goes live, you should see an increase in the number of impressions and clicks but a decrease in the Click through Rate and Quality Score. This will increase the amount you are spending on an adwords campaign as you will be paying more per click of your specific ad.
Google claims that this new update will really benefit advertisers of smaller companies more than anything. This transition will affect those smaller companies in the long run but it seems as though Google is looking to just make as much money as possible.