skibum - 10:18 pm on Jun 18, 2007 (gmt 0)

I think it is a flaw in their thinking when developing the AdWords algo or a just a way to harvest more money from advertisers or both.

You have these quality scores that impact sites who wouldn't be advertising if they weren't making money and if they are making money they must be relevant to the person searching, scraper sites aside.

Then you have this liberal broad matching looking to grab any ad it can find with a high CTR to maximize click revenue for Google and shows ads for irrelevant searches.

A business owner can determine relevancy much better than a computer algorithm in most cases but when you run search campaigns you essentially grant the engine permission to do whatever they want with your ad.

In this case, as Google suggested, negative broad match would fix the problem.

It gets really fun when your ad starts showing up on TM terms for competitors you've never heard of or intended to target and their lawyers send you nice letters to let you know about it. :)