I would never recommend my clients to using broad match nor my own promotions.

Like you I have been burnt when I just started my AdWords advertising journey years ago.

The posts are all very enlightening, not to say how true there are about Google and AdWords.

Isn’t item #6 in the Big G’s corporate philosophy mentioned about “You can make money without doing evil”? (http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html)

How ironic and I feel like having a big laugh.

Yes, that is the monopoly power and we the small little tiny fish just can’t do anything besides accepting the fact and go with the flow or can we?

Too bad that the M Corp and Y Corp just can’t make it in terms of search technologies.

Something tells me it should never have to be this difficult…

No, it shouldn’t. It’s a straight crass money grab by Google (they fill all the vacant SERPS with ads and heat up the competition across the board).

We’ve done a fair amount of work on getting refunds out of Google (bad geo targeting, bots stepping through our AdWords campaigns). They give you such a run around that most people just give up.

So with the unannounced broad match cash grab, they literally lifted thousands out of one of my client’s pockets. Imagine this multiplied across the board.

Monopoly power. What are you going to do…

Stop advertising on AdWords?

Say goodbye to 90% of the paid search market.

So we have to work with it. My solution works very well. Putting it in is only a small nuisance. Nelsonan’s solution works superbly. But is a lot more trouble.

And so collective intelligence defies the Borg. But the Borg still wins as too many AdWords advertisers haven’t read this article and our comments here and don’t know how to defend themselves and don’t even know how they are being pickpocketed.

Regardless I am taking the steps to maximize my negative keyword lists and phrase/exact matches while shrinking my list of broad matches.

Something tells me it should never have to be this difficult…

As Alec mentioned, you have to “qualify” for it and it is my understanding that the majority of accounts, especially smaller ones still do not have this enabled.

Maybe I’m just a fool, but I can’t for the life of my locate that button to turn it off. I can’t find “advanced options” under edit campaign settings. What am I missing??

Also would you consider this a “fix” to the griping that has been taking place for the last several years pertaining to this expanded broad match issue?

thanks

Actually I’ve found that phrase match – with a lot of phrases – gives me most of what broad match used to give me before broad match started to use synonyms and guesses.

But your technique sounds good as well. Thanks for sharing!

@ Jim

Thanks for the tip about that checkbox, “Show ads on more search queries without adding keywords.” I didn’t know about that. Despite having an English degree and working as a search professional for six years, I’m still not quite sure what that sentence means. I hope it does mean what you say it does. I would suggest that Google is trying to be very opaque here.

I agree with you about daily budgets. Why would I want to set my daily budget to close to daily spend? It just means my ads get cut off at one point in the day. A pity that we have to palisade ourselves and our money off, just to stop Google from showing our ads on unrelated (in most cases) and (in the rest of cases) unwanted key phrases

PS. I’ll check out the Firefox 3 issue. We are running and testing on Firefox 2, Safari 3, IE6 and Opera, on a mix of Mac OS X, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Linux. I’ll have to add Firefox 3 to the mix.