"Test" Search

Isn't this ad in violation? ;)

[Frequent]

If you google the word "test" (no quotes required) you will notice an ad in flagrant violation of excessive keyword repetition. Is this no longer part of the rules or do they have an exception?

I would love to know if they actually get a postitive ROI.

Freq---

[poster_boy]

That has negative ROI written all over it.

I would, however, like to hire that copywriter... genius!

[SFReader]

Adwords will kill the ad. In the intermediate time, they will be getting a lot of very low quality cheap clicks while missing most people that actually wanted their product.

[eWhisper]

I'm about 99% sure that ad happens to be an API based test.

It's really not much of a story other than someone making sure the API is being properly integrated with a particular system.

[werty]

I am with ewhisper on this one. It looks like someone set up a test campaign/adgroup and did not realize that it would go live. The brilliant part is that it passed editorial.

Looks like they made it live at 2005/12/02 at 17:01:51, amazing it was noticed so fast.

[toddb]

werty how do you know that?

Notice how the site does pretty well in the natural serps too.

[werty]

I do not think it is their site, I think they just happened to use the same URL, because it corresponds to what they are doing...creating a test.

I know because I clicked their ad and it ads a unique reference code to the end, the last digits are for the date it was made...perhaps for the date it was clicked...I will try again.

[werty]

Interesting, it ads the time/date the click was performed as part of the tracking...

I actually watched the path of the click and it flows through efficient frontier...so they are indeed doing a test...looks like beefing up their tracking, but are obviously running a test. It looks like for client 1109. If someone from there reads this board, please clean up your mess (c;

[shorebreak]

Hi all,

I've alerted our eng/ops team here at Efficient Frontier to this.

Thanks for the heads up,

Shorebreak

[Frequent]

Although I didn't go into quite the level of research as Werty...I did assume this was a test ad that someone mistakenly ran live. Shorebreak, I sure hope your guys weren't paying a buck a click!

I actually did something similar when I first started with adwords. Something to the effect of:

Keyword
blah, blah
blah, blah
www.example.com

Luckily for me the filter caught it. I was a bit surprised that this one had slipped through. Must be an API "feature".

Freq---

[shorebreak]

Issue resolved. Turns out it was a mistake on Google's end. From my eng/ops team:

"I just talked to Google about it this morning actually. It was a mistake on their part and they are crediting back the $38.53 that was spent against it."

Ah, the joys of a duopoly...