I discovered by accident that when I entered an entire merchant's term for a product as an exact match, it would get 1000-2000 impressions a day. Sometimes these can be like 8 words that it seems unlikely someone would manage to type so precisely.
What a find, I thought! I surmised perhaps people paste these in from some source or follow a search link that uses the exact product name.
Then after a week, I noticed they were all impressions, no clicks though often in the #1 spot. Given the diverse and often obscure nature of some of the products, I think I can rule out impression spamming.
Therefore I'm wondering if queries sent by users of the Google API or some other site search automated mechanism was causing these. Anyone think I'm on the right track?
While these precise matches generated very few, if any clicks, the normal vernacular terms people use for these products were getting their standard clicks.
Not knowing much about site scrapers or the Google API yet:
1) Do such queries and methods cause impressions?
2) Should they?
Anyone have any knowledge or experience with this?
Needless to say, these "exact matches" are gone now. Took some AdGroups from 2.0 CTR to 1.0 - just what I needed :)
Thanks,
patient2all
normally i would have asked you, Patient, so anyone know the answer?
I noticed last night that I wasn't including these negative keywords in the campaigns with the huge "exact" impressions
-allinanchor
-allintext
-allintitle
-allinurl
Some of the http advanced operators that Google supports help SEM judge the competition in the SERPs and some other stuff I've never really gotten into much. I notice that these do show AdWords ads in the results also. And I'm willing to bet they'll count as an impression.
Probably not by design, but these research tools hurt AdWords advertisers if indeed they do log impressions.
We'll have to watch over the next couple of weeks as I launch new AdGroups if I run into this. allintext may be the main offender as I notice if I perform an allintext:my adwords headline - my ads show. "my adwords headline" of course is generally the widget that I am advertising.
Then I have 3000 impressions for my exact headline but no clicks where other variations of the same have normal CTRs.
What do you think?
patient2all
