Extended Match feature?

[RonaldM]

First of all I want to say that this is my first post here on the forum. Therefore I am not sure if the issue below has been mentioned before.

Has anyone ever heard of the socalled (at least it is called like this by my Google contactperson) "Extended Match Feature" in the AdWords program?

This is (what they say) what is about:
when someone wants their advertisement to be placed on the word "car" it can happen that ads are shown of competitors who advertise on the word automobile.
They say that the system puts these words in the same category and therefore put the ad for automobile when the search is done on "car".

Usually this would be a great feature, however the problem is now that when you do a search on our company name, ads of competitors (who are in the same line of business) are shown.

Our ads are also showing when you do a search on the name of one of our competitors, although we don't have this as a keyword (which is not a bad thing I guess ;) )

However, does Google charge you for this? In the AdWords programm you get an overview per keyword on the number of times the add has been showed and the number of clicks. How do they charge you then when your add is being shown although you don't have the word as a keyword?

I hope I made myself a little bit clear and that someone has an answer for me.

Thanks in advance!

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, RonaldM!

You are almost certainly referring to Expanded Broad Match, which has been discussed on this Forum at great length in the past. A quick site search (see the bottom of the WebmasterWorld homepage) will yield quite a few threads:

[searchengineworld.com...]

Also, please see this from the AdWords FAQ:

What is the expanded matching feature?
[adwords.google.com...]

However, does Google charge you for this? In the AdWords programm you get an overview per keyword on the number of times the add has been showed and the number of clicks. How do they charge you then when your add is being shown although you don't have the word as a keyword?

The very brief answer to this question is that you are charged every time someone first sees your ad, and then finds it relevant enough to their search to click on.

By the way, if you know for a fact that you'd like for your keywords to not be 'Expanded', I'd suggest using Phrase Matched or Exact Matched keywords.

More info here:

What are keyword matching options?
[adwords.google.com...]

Hope that helps!

AWA