brizad - 12:06 am on Apr 10, 2012 (gmt 0)

I've been seeing this and complaining to google about this for a few years. It falls on deaf ears.

For example...I used to run a campaign for mineral makeup that would continually show for searches related to gardening and other completely unrelated queries. Seriously? How can they be that wrong? I've had similar issues with many different campaigns/client accounts.

As usual, the adwords reps generally don't understand adwords or advertising at all and don't understand why it's bad to show for completely unrelated terms. They are brainwashed that google is perfect and all they can do is parrot their scripts.

They say all I can do about it is to add negative kws. But when you've seen the kind of completely unrelated terms they show your ads for there's no way in the world you could ever come up with all the negative kws you need to to make this a viable alternative.

Yes of course you can set everything to phrase or exact match, but this can cause massive negative changes to your traffic.

It seems to be worse with some niches than others. And it also seems to me that if you are not spending your daily budget, google shows your ads for less and less targeted things in order to spend your daily budget. I have noticed that on several different campaigns/accounts.