Quit it with the broad matching already!

...stop pulling terms from my other campaigns...

[Murdoch]

How annoying,

So lately our account is fraught with impression fraud. A certain term that previously had never any searches suddenly goes up to 400 a day, consistently dropping our CTR.

Problem two: We are a geocentrically focused account. Not in the way that we are geotargeting, but that all of our campaigns and ad groups center around a location. All the other keywords are exactly the same with the difference being the location. So, in other words - 20 campaigns, average of 4 ad groups per campaigns, 20 keywords per ad group, all keywords the same per ad group except for location endings.

The impression problem is only happening in our most important campaigns, so I decided to just add a negative keyword to the ad groups affected. The result? Adwords broad matches to a different ad group in that campaign. Okay, I think. No problem. This keyword was never that great conversion-wise to begin with, so I'll put the negative keyword in all the ad groups in that campaign. The result? An ad gets displayed from another campaign completely?

WHAT?!?

So now if I type in Blue Widgets Texas, I actually get the ad for Blue Widgets California. This is preposterous. I can't broad match ALL my terms since that would severely lower traffic. And I can't add the negative keyword to all campaigns since then I would have no idea where the problem is surfacing. I would expect at least this part of the system to work correctly. This not only defeats any purpose of negative keywords, but completely throws off reporting (since now all the impressions are incorrectly dumped to another campaign).

Any thoughts on what I can do?

[inbound]

Any thoughts? Certainly don't waste your time trying to get Google to fix it. I've been waiting since the algo change for a similar problem to be fixed.

Sorry I have nothing positive, I just thought I'd chip in and see if we can get AWA to get involved.

[cline]

I have similar problems, see [webmasterworld.com...] .

[HitProf]

Yes, this is a wide spread disease.

[cline]

I caught it happening again. In one adgroup I have:

[general widget] low bid

I searched on "general widget" and got an ad from a different adgroup that did not target general widgets, but special widgets. "General widget" is nowhere to be found in this adgroup. As you might, bids are higher for special widgets.

This is really screwing with my ability to manage bids and could potentially wreck adgroups that should otherwise be successful.

[cline]

My rep responded today about the latest example of this problem I found. It was a really clear example of the problem and she forwarded to engineering. Anyone else experiencing this problem should send in examples. What I sent was a screen shot of the search that brought up the wrong ad, and details about which adgroup's ad was activated and what keyword in another adgroup should be triggered.

I'm optimistic that if we can catch enough of these in the wild and can give clear details on what's causing the problem that it will be addressed.