I'm not sure if it's cool to post specific searches, so I'll just try to describe it.
I am bidding on the phrase match "red widget". That means that, assuming a high enough bid and QS, my ad should show for any search that contains this term right? At least that's what I thought.
I just did a search for "long six word red widget phrase" and my ad doesn't show. In fact only 1 ad is displayed.
Mind you "red widget" is extremely competitive. And I notice that if I just leave off the last word of the search term (and there is nothing special about it) then I see what I would consider normal results with tons of ads.
So my question is, is there a maximum search term length that phrase matches apply to, and any search term longer than that doesn't match your phrase match? That's the only thing I can think of.
I've never seen this before, but I am determined to figure it out because it means I'm missing tons of potential traffic I never knew existed. I always figured that my phrase match "red widget" would match any term that contained red widget in it.
Is this a case where Google is actually coming up with a unique "quality score" based on the exact search term, and not showing ads because they deem it's no longer relevent?
As I play around with search terms I'm seeing other weird behavior I have never seen before. For example I just did a slightly different search for "whatever red widget term" and 2 ads were displayed. Then I added the words "can you" to the front of it so the new term was "can you whatever red widget term" and no ads are displayed.
Obviously there is something going on here with phrase matches that I'm not aware of and this is all related.
Anyone?
Let's say some one wants to buy a widget. Previously we'd been getting good results with:
[widget] and widget, and also "widget"
As time progressed, we started bidding on [buy widgets]
The smarter we got, we moved into
"buy widget for", and laterly "buy widget for under"
Since we did this we have been more affected by the qulity score. it worked really well for a while, and our spend went up 3 fold. Then all of a sudden the long phrases were burned, even though they had a huge CTR ec.
The original [widgets] remains GREAT.
The more relevant we make thye searches, it appears that Adwords doesn't like our approach.
Anyone else noticing this?
I don't know this for sure, but I'm guessing they have to be doing it in some capacity: measuring research or commercial intent with ads and keywords (possibly webpages).
There are free tools out there right now (microsoft adlabs, yahoo mindset) that show you the commercial nature of a keyword or of a website. The more that the engines can get this right - the better the user experience.
However, I've not heard of 'buy widgets for' or 'widgets under' being hit by the QS. That's interesting. I really like those types of keywords for finding more long tail matches. I'll have to do a bit of investigation into that one.
