Im not sure I completely understand your situation but i'll give it a try.........If you are taking care of 2 companies Adwords accounts that is in competition with each other you need to have 2 separate accounts....one for each company in order for both to show! If they are in the same account /campaign but different Groups they will conflict and only one will show at a time.
If you only want one AD to show all the time i dont see the logic in having 2 groups?
Maybe you can elaborate?
If I may venture a second guess, I think Zeus may be marketing the same widget for two affiliate programs. If you're doing direct-to-merchant, you feel you may "lose the auction" on one but not the other.
We've already established that if you have 2 ads in the same AdGroup - one direct to merchant, the other to a landing page, Google selects one ad for each search, no preference given to either one. You will either luck out or fail depending on which ad they chose to attempt to display. In other words, Google has already stated there is no advantage to that approach.
I did a quick test on your suggestion, if Google picks the ad that someone else with the same URL beats you out on, Google does not look any further to see if it can find an ad for that keyword that it can show.
In my case, same keyword in 2 adgroups. The direct to merchant had a lower bid than the other adgroup which had a landing page. Google picked direct to merchant and said "Another ad for this URL is already showing" and didn't look any further.
Despite these drawbacks, some of the time you will "win". You have to weigh whether sometimes gaining whatever "direct to merchant" advantage may exist outweighs the disadvantages of losing some of the "auctions".
In my case, these were left this way mostly by accident. The campaign has been so successful, I haven't been paying careful attention to it. At some point I may tighten that up so that the "direct to merchant" at least gets a different set of keywords than the other adgroup. I'll probably double profits!
Even though my comparison of direct to merchant vs. landing page is a little different than what I believe that you are describing, it stands to reason that the results would have turned out the same had they both been direct-to-merchant.
In fact in my case, the direct to merchant adgroup had a 2nd ad with a landing page too and still chose direct to merchant. That adgroup had a higher ctr, BTW.
In other words, Google only assesses one keyword/ad per search.
Disappointed,
patient2all
