Expanded Match spinning further out of control!

[tonerman]

In the past two days Expanded Match has expanded itself in an ominous way. It is showing my ads for searches that are simply for the brand and type products I sell without any reference to model numbers or part numbers.

My site offers Samsung and Sharp toner cartridges and every ad campaign keyword has a specific model or part number in the keywords. Now it showing ads and I am getting clicks for broad queries like "samsung toner cartridges" and "sharp toner cartridges".

It simply grabs one of the ad campaigns within my Sharp or Samsung product's ad campaigns and shows an ad.

I haven't the foggiest idea how to stop this since most of my keywords are written like this: "Sharp AL100TD Toner Cartridge" or "Samsung ML-1740 Toner Cartridge". I can't make "Sharp toner cartridge", for instance, a negative keyword.

Has anyone got any idea how to stop Expanded Match using my two examples above? :confused:

[investing101]

I've been following your posts on this topic, it sounds like it's driving you half mad. Maybe the business can be run without the headaches you're experiencing?

How long have you been doing what you're doing? Do you have enough of a customer base built-up (where your customers have put you in their favorites) that you could eliminate (or reduce) your search engine campaigns and still run a profitable business?

--Joe

[tonerman]

I'm not half mad - its gone beyond that! I'm a virtual ticking timebomb! :eek:

Not really, I just want to do what I did with my first post - tell forum members about issues as they arise with expanded match and create as much awareness as possible as to how Expanded Match is sucking money out of advertiser's wallets.

You are right that Expanded Match irritates the h--- out of me, no doubt. Maybe some people don't mind the wasted clicks and figure it's just something that isn't a big deal, but it offends me - both technically and ethically.

I've been doing what I've been doing since 99 on the web and started advertising on Google when Google offered their first advertising program ages ago. Frankly, I stopped posting info on this problem because I concluded a while back that Google wasn't going to change anything so I've been dealing with it using negative match.

My only point in posting this thread is Expanded Match has broadened itself further and I can't figure out how to stop the examples I included in the thread starter. If you can tell me how to stop the problem I described in the thread starter I'd appreciate your expertise.

[orion]

Hi, tonerman

Interesing point raised.

Based on what you describes with Expanded Match the alphanumeric string or serial number within your keyword phrase are ignored. I haven't tested this but it might be worth to try and see if the problem goes away. Just an idea:

Delimit the alphanumeric, try with hyphens, colons, etc as in

"k1-alphanumeric k2 k3"

"alphanumeric-k1 k2 k3"

"alphanumeric:k1 k2 k3"

or a similar format that will not conflict with manufacturer specifications or confuse prospective clients. Just an idea.


Let me know of any progress.


Orion

[tonerman]

Hi, tonerman

Interesing point raised.

Based on what you describes with Expanded Match the alphanumeric string or serial number within your keyword phrase are ignored. I haven't tested this but it might be worth to try and see if the problem goes away. Just an idea:

Delimit the alphanumeric, try with hyphens, colons, etc as in

"k1-alphanumeric k2 k3"

"alphanumeric-k1 k2 k3"

"alphanumeric:k1 k2 k3"

or a similar format that will not conflict with manufacturer specifications or confuse prospective clients. Just an idea.


Let me know of any progress.


Orion


I can't follow your explanation today. I got to bed pretty late while fixing a fan in my laptop at home. Let me give you an actual broad match keyword phrase, and then please give me the negative keywords to use or modified keyword phrase to use as you are trying to tell me in the above quote.

Ad Campaign Keyword Phrase: "Sharp AL1000 toner cartridge"

How do I stop the ad from displaying for the query "Sharp toner cartridge"? :confused:

[orion]

Hope you have fixed the fan.

I'm not sure if you want to make Sharp, toner or cartridge negative terms.

Just a thought: have tried using underscores?

"Sharp_AL1000 toner cartridge"
"AL1000_Sharp toner cartridge"
"Sharp toner cartridge_AL1000"

Let me know of any progress. I'm interested in the outcome.

Orion

[tonerman]

Hope you have fixed the fan.

I'm not sure if you want to make Sharp, toner or cartridge negative terms.

Just a thought: have tried using underscores?

"Sharp_AL1000 toner cartridge"
"AL1000_Sharp toner cartridge"
"Sharp toner cartridge_AL1000"

Let me know of any progress. I'm interested in the outcome.

Orion

Actually, the keywords I want are "Sharp Al1000 toner cartridge". However, expanded match is ignoring the "AL1000" term and showing the ad in response to the query "sharp toner cartridge". If I understand you correctly you suggest changing the keywords to "Sharp_AL1000 toner cartridge" for instance.

My question to you is what happens to the original intent of the keyword term "Sharp Al1000 toner cartridge"? Seems to me if I make it "Sharp_AL1000 toner cartridge" it won't display the ad for the search query "Sharp Al1000 toner cartridge". Am I missing something here?

[orion]

No, you haven't missing anything. Your reasoning is correct.

General idea is to check the effect of specific delimiters on AdWords and compare with the effect we already know those delimiter cause on general searches. Give it a shot to both using underscores and hyphens or other delimiters and let me know.

Orion

[tonerman]

I added following keywords to the campaign.

Sharp_AL1000 toner cartridge
AL1000_Sharp toner cartridge
Sharp toner cartridge_AL1000

The original keywords are still in the campaign. Now what? Do a search? I did a search for "Sharp toner cartridge" and "Sharp toner cartridges" and didn't see my ad appear thru 4-5 pages of serps. Is that what you were driving at?

I had click today for the query "samsung toner" that came from a campaign with the following keywords:

ML-4500 cartridge
ML-4500 printer cartridge
ML-4500 printer toner
ML-4500 toner
ML-4500 toner cartridge
ML4500 cartridge
ML4500 toner
ML4500 toner cartridge
Samsung ML-4500 cartridge
Samsung ML-4500 printer cartridge
Samsung ML-4500 printer toner
Samsung ML-4500 toner
Samsung ML-4500 toner cartridge
Samsung ML4500 cartridge
Samsung ML4500 printer cartridge
Samsung ML4500 toner
Samsung ML4500 toner cartridge

I didn't modify anything but I just did a search for "samsung toner" and didn't see my ad appear. It obviously appeared for somebody because the search term and click from Google is in my log files clear as day

[AussieWebmaster]

I seem to see an increase in Expanded matches when the Daily Spends are low compared to what is set in the budget... they want to send you more traffic.... if you are staying close to your spends then the expanded does not kick in as fast or at all.

[tonerman]

I think you hit it on the nail Aussie. Saturday and Sunday are slow traffic days for toner cartridges. That would explain it. Do you think this is desirable behavior for Adwords, or or do you dislike it? Personally, I never get more than one page view and a charge from google for these kind of clicks.

[orion]

I did a search for "Sharp toner cartridge" and "Sharp toner cartridges" and didn't see my ad appear thru 4-5 pages of serps. Is that what you were driving at?


Yes. I thought that's what you wanted based on the following:


How do I stop the ad from displaying for the query "Sharp toner cartridge"?

If that was not what you meant, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.

Aussie has a good point, too.

Cheers

Orion

[tonerman]

If adding a few dumb keywords like AL1000_Toner cartridge will stop broad match from displaying my ads for queries I don't want I'll add them to all my campaigns Orion! I just don't know if the ad did not display today for my trial search because my ad spend was higher today than this weekend like Aussie suggested, or if your keyword tactics stopped the ad from displaying.

One way for me to get some insight is to calculate some CTR's manually. Expanded Match impressions do not count in computing CTR's. If the numbers don't match the CTR Google displays then I might be able to detect expanded match impressions. However, since CTR's are only one 1 digit I doubt if the differences will be detectable unless there are a lot of expanded match impressions.

I'll add some more keywords to other campaigns being effected like Samsung_ML-4500 toner,etc and see what happens this week.

After posting the above response I checked several of my large campaigns by brand for the entire month using Nettracker and and there were only two instances of ignoring the model and part numbers completely and showing ads for queries like "Samsung toner cartridge. Both clicks occured this weekend.

I think it is new Expanded Match behavior and Aussie's comment might be connected to it. However, I had plenty of other low traffic days before with the same campaigns and keywords and clicks like I reported when I started this thread had never happened before this weekend.

[orion]

Great. Let me know of the experiment outcome.

Based on what we already know from Google serps, terms delimited by underscores (e.g., k1_k2) are interpreted as single terms, while hyphenated terms (e.g., k1-k2) are interpreted as terms following a localized EXACT sequence (even if hyphenated queries are submitted with the default FINDALL; i.e. AND).

Thus, the goal of the experiment now is to test if all this is also valid for AdWords.

I'm of the opinion that it should be the case.

This is why I suggested in your case in particular (for other cases this might be contraindicated), the use of underscores. That should kill the regexp match, without resourcing to negative terms.

Being interpreted as one word island (or dumb keyword as you said) it should not trigger your ad, regardless of the day of the week. Well, let see what happen. We have one week for the experiment.


Orion

[tonerman]

Great. Let me know of the experiment outcome.

Based on what we already know from Google serps, terms delimited by underscores (e.g., k1_k2) are interpreted as single terms, while hyphenated terms (e.g., k1-k2) are interpreted as terms following a localized EXACT sequence (even if hyphenated queries are submitted with the default FINDALL; i.e. AND).

Thus, the goal of the experiment now is to test if all this is also valid for AdWords.

I'm of the opinion that it should be the case.

This is why I suggested in your case in particular (for other cases this might be contraindicated), the use of underscores. That should kill the regexp match, without resourcing to negative terms.

Being interpreted as one word island (or dumb keyword as you said) it should not trigger your ad, regardless of the day of the week. Well, let see what happen. We have one week for the experiment.

Orion

If the campaign has the term "AL 1000 toner cartridge" AND "AL_1000 toner cartridge" both doesn't this screw up the experiment? The correct model number involved is "AL-1000." However, users often enter "AL1000" or "AL 1000." How will adding "AL_1000 toner cartridge" to the campaign change Google's behavior?

If I got rid of all broad match keywords except "AL_1000 toner" and "AL_1000 cartridge" how would google normally respond to a search query for "AL 1000 toner"?

I did a search on Google for "HP_5Si_Toner" and there were no Google Adwords ads displayed and the results summary said:

Results 1 - 5 of about 7 English pages for HP_5Si_Toner. (0.70 seconds)

When I did a search for "HP 5Si Toner" the Adwords ads appeared by the gazillions and the results summary displayed:

Results 1 - 10 of about 15,700 English pages for HP 5Si Toner. (0.26 seconds)


When I did a search for "HP_5si toner" the summary said "Results 1 - 10 of about 146 English pages for HP_5Si toner. (1.56 seconds)

Hate to say it, but I still don't get it. I catch on slow, but in the end I catch on good. Patience please.

[orion]

Don't worry, you are thinking all the right questions.


This is what I would expect from the experiment.

1. If you set "Al_1000 toner" then queries for "AL1000 toner" or "AL 1000 toner" should not trigger the ad because "AL_1000" does not match "AL1000" or "AL 1000". Queries will trigger the ad if "Al_1000 toner" is queried.

2. If you set "HP_5Si toner" then queries for "HP 5Si toner" should not trigger the ad. In this case queries will trigger the ad if "HP_5Si toner" is queried.

3. If you set "Al-1000" then queries for "Al 1000" should match this but queries for "Al1000" shouldn't.

4. If the campaign has both "AL 1000 toner cartridge" AND "AL_1000 toner cartridge" that indeed might screw the experiment "as is" because there will be a regexp match for either one a given user is querying.


Again, in about a week you should have a good test sample.


Orion

[tonerman]

I seem to see an increase in Expanded matches when the Daily Spends are low compared to what is set in the budget... they want to send you more traffic.... if you are staying close to your spends then the expanded does not kick in as fast or at all.

Aussie: I've been blowing away a lot of individual keywords and shutting down losing Ad campaigns thye past few days based on my Analytics data. My daily ad spend is dropping pretty fast and Expanded Match has started hunting for clicks for me as the 3:00AM PST witching hour starts approaching tonight.

Sure enough, out of the blue a query for "NEC 860" got me a click on an very specialized NEC 870 product that I had forgotten about. This hadn't happened for the past month. I think you are on to something Aussie about when expanded match kicks in with anything it can throw up in response to a query.

I'll skip my usual ranting in this post and just print some #@$*%!!#. :)

[cline]

Gag, today I was doing some competitive research on a very specific 4 word phrase including a brand name and model number, a search that should trigger large numbers of reasonably relevant ads, enough to go 3 or 4 pages, I see 3 irrelevant ads, 2 of which are in completely irrelevant product categories.

What's really crazy is that my client's ad did not show on the keyword, even though it is specifically targeted and historically has obtained a 21.6% CTR.

Sure, there's a chance that some idiot PPC managers targeted these keywords, but my bet is that it's expanded broadmatch spinning further out of control.

[AussieWebmaster]

Gag, today I was doing some competitive research on a very specific 4 word phrase including a brand name and model number, a search that should trigger large numbers of reasonably relevant ads, enough to go 3 or 4 pages, I see 3 irrelevant ads, 2 of which are in completely irrelevant product categories.

What's really crazy is that my client's ad did not show on the keyword, even though it is specifically targeted and historically has obtained a 21.6% CTR.

Sure, there's a chance that some idiot PPC managers targeted these keywords, but my bet is that it's expanded broadmatch spinning further out of control. Not showing though seems off.... or there are a lot of oblique referrals to this phrase and not direct ones that your advertiser is using.... if he is also open to content then maybe his spend limits the broad expansion.

[tonerman]

I look at my Google PPC queries everyday and try to stop bad expanded match clicks whenever possible with negative keywords. However, some clicks are impossible to stop.

If you sell a hundred different GE toaster models with a different page for each one and someone queries "GE toaster" without a model number Broad Match will grab one of the toaster models and show an ad for that model. You can't make either "GE" or "Toaster" negative keywords because they would blow away the whole campaign.

I notice Broad Match doing exactly what Aussie suggested - trying to get some clicks when you are below budget for the day. Consequently, most of these dumb clicks occur very late in the evening = 10PM - 12PM PST. They just sweeten the pot for Google with no benefit to the advertiser.

[cline]

Not showing though seems off.... or there are a lot of oblique referrals to this phrase and not direct ones that your advertiser is using.... if he is also open to content then maybe his spend limits the broad expansion.

It's a really specific phrase: "Brand X Model # widget name". Just like the problems tonerman is experiencing. I'm not at liberty to say what it is, but to use a similar example based on tonerman's experience, let's say the phrase is "samsung ip1730 toner cartridge". The competing ads are for:

* Brother printers (offering new printers)
* Voip phone services
* Dodge automobiles

The first one could be just stupid targeting. The second may be expanded broadmatched due to "ip" in the model number. The third one requires some logical leap beyond my imagination.

What's just mind-boggling is that Adwords did not deliver my client's ad offering samsung ip1730 toner cartridges and specifically keyword targeting (broadmatch) "samsung toner ip1730 cartridges" with a historical 21.6% CTR.

Like almost all of my clients, this client has no meaningful spend limit. If Adwords will deliver us the traffic to the keywords we target and the bids we specify, we'll make money.

The problem here is getting Adwords to deliver the traffic to the keywords we target.

[tonerman]

Sure do hope you find out why your ads aren't appearing - and that you'll share it with us. Think it might be some dumb quality score thing? Bid amount? With an historical 20% plus CTR doesn't make any sense.

From Google site:

"Helpful Tip: Need help with finding your keyword-targeted ad? Our Ads Diagnostic Tool can let you know whether your ad is appearing on the first page of search results, and identify why a particular ad or group of ads may not be showing. You can access the tool at any time via the Tools link on the Campaign Management tab."

Does this tool help?