weird adwords behavior

[chindofoo]

I have a campaign in my adwords account with only one ad variation. The headline of the ad is "Buy Fiberglass Skimboards" and the following keywords are associated with this campaign and nothing else:

buy fiberglass skimboard
competition skimboard
custom skim board
fiberglas skimboard
fiberglas skimboards
fiberglass skim board
fiberglass skim boards
fiberglass skimboard
fiberglass skimboards
foam skim board
foam skim boards
foam skimboard
foam skimboards
victoria skim boards
zap skimboard

In a second campaign, I have one and only one ad variation,the headline reading "Skimboards on Sale" and the following keywords:

skim board
skim boards
skimboard
skimboards

Why then is it that when I type "skimboards" (without the quotes) in the google.com search box, I see my ad that starts with "Buy Fiberglass Skimboards" when the keywords associated with that ad DOES NOT contain that keyword skimboard, but instead only has two phrase keywords? This makes no sense. Is this a bug in the adwords system, or am I missing something?

[poster_boy]

On what match types are the keywords listed? Were the groups added at the same time - or did one have more history than the other?

[chindofoo]

The keywords are all broad matched, and the Fiberglass Skimboards campaign does have more history than the other one.

[chindofoo]

If one of the campaign has more history than the other one, how would that change the fact that adwords is pulling the ad copy from another totally separate campaign?

[poster_boy]

If you want to control how your keywords match to queries more accurately, I'd recommend adding these keywords on Exact match to your 2nd group. You can also add these specific terms on Negative Exact Match (like this: -[skimboards]) to specifically prevent them from matching to the 1st group, as well.

Broad match does strange things - so I won't pretend to know the details of why your ads are matching the way that they are... but, it's not "pulling the ad copy from another totally separate campaign"... Google is somehow matching this query to a keyword in the 1st group and since they're all on broad match - there's a number of reasons why this is happening (including 'history' overriding what may seem like a more logical match). But, you have controls available to you to address this situation. Good luck.