i have green widget in the correct order, so why is my ad not displaying? For a 7 day period, i am down 40% in clicks and impressions, which to me looks like our ads really aren't being triggered.
Anyone else have a problem with phrase matching in their adwords account? I would love to know what others have found. Despite platinum status, they take their sweet time getting back to us.
...i am bidding on the term "green widget." When i search for "green widget," the ad displays fine. when i search for "buy green widget," no ad. When i search for "green widget and other stuff," no ad...Anyone else have a problem with phrase matching in their adwords account?
BDuns, it is actually a relatively common misconception that phrase match (and broad match as well) is meant as a guarantee that one's ads will appear for any and all variations of the phrase (or broad) matched keywords. This is not really the case, however. Instead, with phrase or broad matching, your ads are meant to show only for variations that are likely to be relevant.
Excerpting from the AdWords Help Center, with bolded italics added by me:
If you enter your keyword in quotation marks, as in "tennis shoes," your ad will appear when a user searches on the phrase tennis shoes, in this order, and possibly with other terms in the query...
At the bottom line, if there are important variations that you know you'd like to have your ad appear for, it's best to have these important terms entered as keywords in their own right - rather than relying on broad or phrase match to include them.
AWA
So you want G to gather every possible thing people have typed in as well as predict which new combinations people will type in, in the future, compare that to your keywords, ads and site and figure out the relevant ones that you might rank well enough for to show now and forever going forward...
Can you imagine how long that list might be? You'd never read through it, it'd be too long.
And about that constant changing thing... your complaint makes me wonder... what would you say to G if they complained to you about your site constantly changing and your keywords, bids and ads changing... and how their job would be easier if you'd just tell them now about all the future changes you plan to make so they can stop the guessing game they must play to figure out what you're doing and how it may match to the traffic you desire to bid on?
And you don't "have" to play a guessing game - use exact match if you dislike the uncertainty associated with phrase match - where that uncertainty is predicting what else people will type in before and after your phrase match terms.
Your complaint seems completely unwarranted and unrealistic to me, but I haven't had my morning coffee yet...
:-)
I realize this would not work for everyone, but we have a few phrases that will be at least somewhat relevant every time.
What would be helpful to know is what percentage of queries with my phrase are being filtered out as "not relevant". Is it 20%? 80%?
This is one place where I'm leary that their algorithms are falling short. I have seen many a query that does not return my phrase match ad even though it's relevant.
At this point, it would be valuable to have a tool that actually does phrase match in all cases as opposed to hunting down thousands upon thousands of combinations that might occur.
Can you imagine how long that list might be? You'd never read through it, it'd be too long.
No Shiitake Sherlock... that's my point. Google should let phrase match work like it's supposed to - and let us decide what is relevant or not. Let all phrases pass through with broad phrase like they are supposed to - and then let us use our own tracking to decide what phrases we think are relevant. Then if we think the phrase is relevant we can expand upon these phrases ourselves with exact phrasing.
So if someone types in "green widgets imported from bulgaria" and you're bidding phrase match on "green widgets", but yours are made and shipped from ohio, it's your position that G should forsake its relevance determinations and show your ad so that you can HOPE to get a click and then see the term in your logs, mine your logs/analytics and make a decision to bid on this phrase specifically as a new keyword?
"let us decide what is relevant or not"
G won't do this, they can't - they're serving the consumer / searcher, not your keyword generation needs (though they do provide tools to do that apart from the live action of their golden money machine).
They should. If not, they should at least improve their algorithms. We have a phrase match for "widget news". Specifically, we are a publisher that offers a free newsletter filled with widget news. Type in "researching widget news" and our ad doesn't show. That is stupid. It's stupid for users, stupid for us, and stupid for Google.
Sure they cut down on costs by serving less ads, but is that really how they want to save money?
for the news example... you offer "widget news" on your site. seems most people would search for that. adding the modifier "researching" MAY mean they're not as interested in the news itself, but researching it... I'm not asserting this is the case for everyone searching for "researching widget news", but wonder if the grayness in the meaning leads G to err on the side of caution.
if researchers and researching are important to your business, I'd think you'd add some content pertinent to exactly that and to add keywords that fit those cases as well.
i know what i'm saying isn't popular, we're all chasing max traffic - but with an eye on relevance and specificity, roi goes higher and is better than chasing every keyword permutation under the sun.
if you got your wish and showed for every variation, you'd get imps and clicks for your ad for...
fake widget news
bulgarian widget news
widget news lawsuits
stop widget news
widget news sucks
los angeles widget news stands
widget news for nazis
widget news refund
widget news awards
without aiming, targeting, focusing... you can't expect G to serve up everything that "close".
if you want to aim wider, bid it broad. by bidding it phrase, you're telling G to aim somewhat narrowly.
We do broad, phrase, and exact match. It would be more useful if phrase match actually showed our ads for every instance of the phrase. Short of that, Google should at least work on improving their "relevance" algorithms for phrase match. Those are way too restrictive at this point.
Only they have the data, but I would be curious to find out what percentage is phrase match capturing. I applaud Google's efforts to better serve users, but there are many niches where it would be more useful to show a targeted phrase match ad rather than less-relevant organic results. This especially applies to niches and keywords that have less competition.
To this discussion I'd like to add that user experience over time is exceeding important to Google, and should also be exceedingly important to advertisers as well (my opinion, of course) - at least to those who have an eye towards the future. To me, it boils down to this:
An advertising program which delivers ads that users trust (and click on), over time, is of great value to advertisers.
A system that delivers ads that users distrust and ignore is of much less value to advertisers.
IMO, advertisers who are concerned with the long term trust (read: likelihood to click) of their potential customers should be doing everything they can to optimize that user experience - even if the result is lower traffic in the near term.
Again, this is just my opinion. And, to repeat an important point made earlier in the thread: given that AdWords works the way it does, it's best to have terms entered as keywords in their own right - rather than relying on broad or phrase match to include them - if you know you'd like for your ads to appear on those queries.
AWA
I'm all for making Google a better resource for users. There is always room for improvement on that front and these days I see fewer eBay blast ads so I tend to believe it. Still, I think users are better served by having a few ads on niche keywords even if the ads are a bit less relevant. I know I've done numerous searches where the ads are much more relevant than the organic results. This isn't surprising...people still have an edge over computers and algorithms.
Maybe a strict phrase match option and a few others could be offered as "Advanced Bidding Options".
An advertising program which delivers ads that users trust (and click on), over time, is of great value to advertisers.A system that delivers ads that users distrust and ignore is of much less value to advertisers.
That assumes that if a consumer doesn't click on an ad, that they don't trust the ad. That's very seldom the case. Usually that just means that they are clicking on an ad that is better written.
So i was able to get an answer from our G reps regarding the phrase match.
Apparently, my "green widget" keyword didn't have a high enough quality score to display an ad when someone searched for "buy a green widget."
So if the quality is too low to show an ad, how the heck do you build quality through clicks? I can't show an ad because nobody has clicked on it, and it won't show until i get clicks, but i can't get clicks because it doesn't show....Seems our reps decided to ignore that point in my email, and give me the lame "click here to view our help topics."
So when I went back to them to inquire about click fraud on some broad match keywords...they told me to narrow it down with phrase matching...the KW's didn't show, now I'm forced to go back to broad match and waste more money.
Dubya Tee Eff?
[edited by: BDuns at 8:43 pm (utc) on April 19, 2007]
"buy round red widgets"
or
"red round widgets"
Does anyone get the impression that it still works that way?
Back when I understood adwords and could predict precisely what to bid and count on a conistent profit, phrase did work that way....
Israel
