For all the internet marketers out there; you may want to begin formulating a new Adwords strategy for your Clients. Google Adwords is pushing a change which will spell out the end of exact match keywords. This change comes into effect sometime in September. Previously when you setup a campaign you had the ability to opt out of Close Variant keywords. This meant that you could target specific phrases "Web Design Forums", "Website Design Forums", etc. without Close Variant's interferring and subsequently displaying your ad when someone searched for "Website Design Companies" for example. For high competition niches the more specific your Ad, the more targetted your Advertising campaign, the more targetted your advertising campaign - well the higher probability your product was being seen by hot leads not just cold or luke-warm leads.
Although eliminating the option to opt out of Close Variants will broaden the audience your ads will probably reach; the downfalls are huge, for one - expect your advertising budgets to be bigger. Bigger audience, more clicks, more money. And dont forget a larger audience doesn't necessarily mean more conversions. Not to mention that now your advertising will probably end up in alot bigger playing field which also means more competition for your leads to actually find your website.
But not all is lost, for smaller/less experienced marketing agencies and DIY'ers; this change will take out some of the complexities of developing an advertising campaign. For example now you won't need 9+ variants of a keyword (for the different ways it will be searched or the various spellings and mispellings of a word).
This is an interesting change indeed, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out. If you want to read up more Search Engine Land has a few articles about it; one that explains the change fairly well is located at:
http://searchengineland.com/farewell-pure-exact-match-google-will-soon-force-campaigns-close-variants-enabled-200615
