We’ve talked a little about PPC on this blog before. No, PPC is not SEO, but it’s also an incredibly important part of your search marketing strategy, and it affects your SEO.

How? Well, the traffic you’re getting on your blog from a good PPC campaign, along with the way users view your site, affects your visibility. Bounce rate is something Google may keep in mind when calculating SEO, so if you’re running a PPC campaign, you should be carefully watching your Analytics.

Here’s some more interesting food for thought – Google loves spending your money. PPC is a significant source of income for Google, so they’re going to squeeze you for what they can reasonably (and sometimes unreasonably get).

This week, in the middle of working on a client campaign, I saw something important I’d forgotten about over the past few months.

If you don’t know what Google Auto Matching is, it’s one of those important things about doing search marketing on Google that you need to burn into your memory.

Auto Matching is a Google PPC feature that allows Google to find “other relevant keywords” that you may not necessarily specify in your initial keyword lists, and to match those searches with your ads.

Doesn’t that sound appealing? Well, it shouldn’t. You don’t really have any control over what Google decides should be relevant traffic. This means that Google could be earning you tons of idiot clicks at your expense – and that’s going to lead directly to blowing right through your budget.

How do you know what terms Google is matching you on? You don’t, really. You can do some sample searches with your keywords to see what comes up, but other than that, the whole matter just takes a little control out of your hands.

Here’s how you get rid of Auto Matching:

In your Google PPC Client Center, access each campaign individually, and click on the “Settings” tab.

You will see, at the very bottom, an option panel for automatic matching. It should look something like this:

If you don’t see Auto Matching, then your account isn’t eligible for it, so you don’t have to worry.

If you do see Automatic Matching as an option, and it says you’re opted in, click “Edit” and simply turn it off.

Make sure to watch your traffic and expense before and after you disable Automatic Matching. In very few cases, we’ve seen Auto Matching turn even more of a profit for advertisers, but we’re talking 1% of 100% of customers.

Google is going to take the opportunity of the auto matching function being on to spend, spend, spend. If you’re an affiliate, this could be especially crushing. Affiliates often use a broad spectrum of keywords in content campaigns to attract traffic, so you could end up spending a ton of money and getting plenty of irrelevant clicks.

You should be doing whatever possible to get control of all your advertising campaigns, regardless of whether or not you’re running PPC, SEO, or Email.