Wrong ads shown in Adwords? Pleas help me!

Hi there,

Today something strange happends.
I have a CPC campagne divided in several regional groups.
For example:

Group1:
keywords:
"keyword + region1"

Ads:
"Keyword + region1 etc......"

Group1:
keywords:
"keyword + region2"

Ads:
"Keyword + region2 etc......"

Now, this morgning i searched in google on "keyword + region1" but i got the ad from group 2: "Keyword + region2 etc......"

How is that possible? what is going wrong?
thanks a lot!

My guess is you are using broad matched keywords. Google will "expand" your keywords on broad matches.

Example: your broad-match keyword is "car repair manhattan" in the first group. Even though you may have "car repair brooklyn" in the second group and someone searches on "car repair manhattan", Google can look at the second keyword and, knowing that Brooklyn is close to Manhattan, decides to show that ad in your second group.

That's but one possible example. If I searched on "auto repairs new york city", it may show either one of your ads in either group. It may even show your ads for searches such as "garages in new york that fix Hondas". Google makes a connection between your keyword "repair" and "fix" as well as "car" and "Honda". You don't even need to have "new york" in your search and your ads may show. Your geo-targeting may have an effect as well.

That's one reason to avoid the broad match, especially generic keywords. Use phrase and exact more often.

thanks for yr answer.. well it must something like that. the only problem is that the two regions in this matter are very far away from eachother.. so it does not really make sense..

But, the whole broad match idea is for keywords that are not included in yr campaign but are close to the keywords that are in the campaing right? In this case the broad keyword is just in another group so google should just display the ad in the concerning group.. or am i wrong?

thnx again!

The idea of broad match is to show your ads for any search containing all your keywords in any order. At least that's the intent.

Example: I bid on broad "timex watches" and you would expect to trigger ads on searches containing all those words, and only those words, not necessarily in that order.

However, Google expands broad matches. It knows that Bulova is also a watch maker and may trigger your ads on searches such as "bulova watches", which is not what you want.

I avoid broad matches, especially 2 or 3-word keywords. Longer tailed has less risk to get expanded but Google still makes some assumptions sometimes which are plain wrong.

I use broad matches with many keywords simply because I cannot account for every variation on the types of searches performed in my phrase and exact matches. It's a catch-all. But Google expands broad matches in many ways, so I try to limit them.

By the way, Yahoo does it too and seems to be worse. The longer and more specific your keyword in Google but especially Yahoo, the better.

There is a 99.9% probability that you don't understand the types of keyword matching that occurs when your ads go public. Best study up on this information and use it to control where your ads appear....

keyword = broad match
"keyword" = match exact phrase
[keyword] = match exact term only
- keyword = don't match this term