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title: An ad group of mine was set to exact match
author: Giacomo Balli
published: 2026-08-11
url: https://BigBalli.com/blog/an-ad-group-of-mine-was-set-to-exact-match
tags: Product, Data, Business
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# An ad group of mine was set to exact match

*By Giacomo Balli* | *Published: August 11, 2026*

An ad group of mine was set to exact match. It spent 96% of its budget on something else.

A setting called Search Match was switched on underneath it, so the platform served the ad against queries I never chose and would never have chosen. Cost per acquisition came in at five times break even.

On the dashboard the keyword looked like it was failing. The keyword was fine. The setting was wrong.

I have seen that shape three more times since, never in advertising. A channel gets written off. A budget gets cut. A strategy changes. Nobody goes back to check whether the test that produced the verdict was the test anyone intended to run.

It matters most when the verdict is expensive. Killing a channel, replacing a system or firing an agency on the strength of a number that came out of a misconfiguration is hard to walk back, and the people presenting the number rarely audited how it was produced.

Before you act on a bad result, spend an hour confirming you ran the experiment you think you ran. Most "this does not work" conclusions are instrumentation failures wearing a strategy costume.

https://lnkd.in/eBJN8NkQ

[Discuss on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7503852297219670016)

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**Tags:** Product, Data, Business

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