Today in the AdWords Help Forum AdWords Pro Stephen shared a great tip for advertisers who see the wrong ad groups ad text appearing for search queries.
Stephen explained that Google uses what he referred to an an “advanced form of expanded matching“, Googles documentation refers to it as an “enhancement of broad match”. Stephen explained this feature as an ad being triggered based on a related previous search query.
Stephen explained the feature…
“[snip]…in this instance, the advertiser had a single AdWords Campaign with two different Ad Groups. Let’s say that one ad used the keyword ‘spacely sprockets’ and the other ad used the keyword ‘cogswell cogs.’ When the advertiser searched on the term ‘cogs,’ the ad for ‘spacely sprockets’ showed rather than the ‘cogswell cogs’ ad that they expected to see.
We knew that it wasn’t an issue of targeting or Daily Budget because both Ad Groups were in a single campaign and shared the same settings and budget. Likewise, the Ads Diagnostic tool indicated that the keyword ‘cogswell cogs’ was showing, as did the Ads Preview page. Finally, we ran a Search Query report and found that searches for ‘cogs’ were triggering the keyword ‘spacely sprockets’ based on previous queries.
The AdWords system had determined that ‘cogs’ was a valid expanded match for ‘spacely sprockets’, and because the keyword ‘spacely sprockets’ had a higher Ad Rank than ‘cogswell cogs,’ it was eligible to show.
This seems a little backward, but its really no different than any other expanded match. Had the ‘cogswell cogs’ Ad Group contained the keyword ‘cogs,’ it would have matched the query more closely and that ad would have triggered, but from the system’s point of view an expansion is an expansion, and neither ‘cogswell cogs’ nor ‘spacely sprockets’ matched the query exactly.”
Show Ad Variation with Search Query
Search Query Performance Report – Check queries against ad text shown
Can advertisers do anything to prevent this?
Stephen recommends:
“[snip]… Because the advertiser had specific landing pages for each Ad Group, it was important to them that the query “cogs” trigger the “cogswell cogs” Ad Group, so I recommended that they add the specific term ‘cogs’ as a keyword. Another option would have been to add it as a negative keyword in the ‘spacely sprockets’ Ad Group, but it’s not guaranteed that the keyword ‘cogswell cogs’ would have expanded to match the query ‘cogs.’ Of course, changing the matching option of the existing keyword to exact match would have kept the ad from showing for the previous query, but it would also have prevented it from showing in other circumstances.”
So, there is a ‘fix’ for this but I still see a potential problem for many advertisers who can barely keep up with the basic features of adwords. This feature makes the search query report more important than ever to make sure advertisers are getting the best possible performance for their accounts.
A special Thanks to Stephen for sharing this info with us – Read AdWords Pro Stephen’s Full Tip Post from the AdWords Help Forum.
 Article by: +Kim Clinkunbroomer Clinks Web Service a Google AdWords Partner Company Subscribe: RSS Feeds | Follow me on Twitter |
Don’t count on any of these solutions above. Adwords has gone haywire over the last month and getting keywords to pull the right ads within a campaign is becoming a random event. Nothing seems to work, not negative keywords to prevent the wrong ads from showing, not setting up exact match keywords. Nothing is working. I manage 50 campaigns and this started happening sporadically in many of them over the past month. Seemed to co-incide with the strange quality score drop that occurred in late November.