Tropical_Island - 8:07 pm on Oct 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

Being in the tourism industry we broad match for many regional terms including mispellings and plurals as we have no idea what a potential visitor is searching for and we want to reach most of them. For those we don't we use negative keywords. These keywords run to almost 100 for many terms when you count all the sex industry and searches for things like maps, weather and specific hotel names.

In many cases we were the only ones there escaping the presence of the "big 2" and smaller competitors. It has been discussed here in other threads that AdWords had started to show mispellings for terms which really annoyed me as my uninformed (or lazy)competitor started showing up for many search terms that he would never have figured out on his own. I suppose that it will only get worse.

When AdWords got into "content impressions" you could tell that the search engine changes were just a short flicking of the switch away.

The question now is will the changes keep our ROI at the same level which at the moment we are very happy with. Our budget can't grow too much larger as we have a maximum potential.

It's very nice of Over and Google to keep introducing new ways to get us to spend more however there is a limit. We have cut back on our Over spending because of practices we felt were not straight forward and honest. Their arbitrary Word Matching without showing us the phrases for which we are paying is the strongest objection I have. It is downright dishonest.

If the list that Google is providing is complete then we can negative out those terms we don't want. If it's only a general summary and there will be terms that we show up for that we can't track then I disagree strongly.