Microsoft announced that Bing Ads is now including close variants in broad match. The move follows an announcement by Google that it was adding close variant matching to all exact and phrase keywords.

Some advertisers were less than thrilled with Google’s news, as they felt it meant less control over their keyword targeting.

Microsoft’s Matt Bisson writes on the Bing Ads blog:

Broad match modifier is a feature which helps you narrow down your broad match, to ensure that you can better control the intent of the users seeing your ads, but still benefit from the additional volume that broad match offers. However, to date, you may have been missing out on keywords with the very intent you are looking for, which are misspelled, abbreviated or written using different grammar.

To ensure that you maximize impressions that are relevant to your modifiers, Bing Ads is launching close variants for broad match modifier. This means that your ad will now also show when the user types queries which contain minor grammatical variations of your modifiers, including plurals, abbreviations, acronyms, spacing, misspellings, accents, punctuation, and equivalent expressions.

The changes are for the U.S. only for now. Microsoft is rolling the changes out across this market. They’re in the testing stage for international markets.

Image via Bing