Ads Displayed Grouped Into Categories (Seeking Specificity)

[Scott_F]

Noticed something new this morning down the right rail. I searched for "airline pilots", while logged into Google with location set to our west-suburban Chicago location. The ads were grouped with the following headings:

Related to airline pilot salary
Related to airline pilot costume
Related to airline pilot jobs

Here's a screen shot:
[pwim.com ]

Clearly an attempt to achieve higher relevance from a very general, ambiguous search. Anybody else seen this?

[Scott_F]

Looks like I wasn't the only one to spot this new method of Adwords ad display. Here's a post by Mike Higgins of Search Engine People on the same topic:

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/google-testing-segmenting-ppc-markets-session-based-broad-match.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SearchEnginePeople+%28Search+Engine+People%29&utm_content=Twitter

He explains that Google is essentially segmenting broad/general toward the long tail. This results in fewer page-one slots for each segment, which could make the broad match ad market more competitive, raising CPC required to appear on page one.