Helen M. Overland

Is AdWords Running Amok?

...Fun with Expanded Match

By: Helen M. Overland, May 15, 2006


The oddest thing happened to one of my AdWords campaigns the other day. I am bidding on one reasonably generic term, say, "small widgets", with a broad match. Because the campaign is relatively niche, the cost of this is reasonable, and allows me to retrieve new keywords from the logs. In addition, I also have quite a few more targeted tail terms at a much, much lower CPC. These tail terms, as you may know, can be great for your conversion rate. You can point visitors directly to a page, not just of "small widgets", but actual "small blue widgets", which is of course exactly what they are looking for.

But the odd thing that happened was this: searches for my targeted tail terms began showing my more generic, more expensive, ads. Even odder, the plural version of the ad group showed the correct ad, but the singular keyword displayed the generic ad. I've performed multiple searches with multiple methods, and nowhere, nowhere are these keywords duplicated in any campaign.

Some of you may not be aware that Googles' "Expanded Match" seems to be expanding. Perhaps it's eaten too much spam? Please pardon my bad taste in humour. It seems that others are having trouble with expanded match, too. But in essence, the Expanded Match system attempts to display broad match ads in response to synonyms and "like" terms. This is the current default behavior of broad match ads. It can be good for you, if that's what you want. If you bid on "small widgets", your ad may appear for "little widgets", which could work out really well for your campaign... if that's what you want.

If you're using dynamic keywords you may ask, "So what? My ad will still be mostly relevant". But why pay $2.00 a click for the generic ad when you can pay the $0.05 for the tail term that the visitor was actually looking for?

Also there is the question of landing pages. If a user searches for "little blue widgets", Extended Match could show your generic ad, at $2.00 a click, for "small widgets". The ad deposits the visitor at your nicely formatted page of "small widgets". While this could be acceptable for lower-priced keywords, it's not ideal. If they search for "small blue widgets", you want to pay the $0.05 you actually bidded to land them on a page full of small, blue, widgets.

The essence of the problem is this: Expanded Match is all good and well, but it shouldn't be overriding keywords that are actually bidded on. There is no reason at all for expanded match to show a generic ad for a keyword that is "hard bidded" with its very own ad elsewhere.

My choices as an advertiser are:

1. Change all my broad match ads to phrase match with all the variations I can think of
2. Let it go and keep an eye on it
3. Bid my ads down
4. Invest in long lists of negative keywords
5. Hope Google fixes the problem soon.

While I don't really like any of these options, I suspect I may keep an eye on it for now. The CPC is not excessively high, and still converts reasonably well. But it is annoying to think that the ad group you set up over 5 years ago, and have tweaked with 5 years worth of data, could now be ignored because one of the keywords is a synonym for one of your other, more expensive ads. More importantly, I have other things to do besides spending hours and hours converting my ads from broad match to phrase match.

There have been many suggestions on how Google should work with advertisers on Expanded Match. Some have suggested that Google show all of the keywords that would be matched against the ad. But do you really want to spend the next years of your life keeping an eye on, and tracking down new negative keywords for all your campaigns? The ability to turn Expanded Match off, too, would be very helpful. Personally, I believe that just having AdWords check that the Expanded Match is not already bidded on elsewhere would be a wonderful feature.

If it's not worth changing our campaigns at this time, we can only watch and analyze and wait. Hopefully our visitors will soon again see the page they are looking for... a page of small... blue... widgets.



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