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.

Edit all your campaigns and once and use the down arrow functionality to turn them all off.

In addition, it is my understanding that Expanded Broad Match does not kick in at all if you are hitting your daily budgets. It will only kick in if you are not reaching your budget. I for one have my budgets way above what I ever spend, so Expanded Broad Match is/was kicking in, but it may not be for everyone.

I have tried to use the Search Query report to see what Expanded Broad match was matching (to see if it came up with anything good that I had missed), but between the mix of what it aggregates and the unique queries it makes it nearly impossible to figure out what exactly expanded broad match is actually matching.

PS your wordpress comment box does not seem to want to let me submit with Firefox 3, had to switch to IE to get it to work for me.

I mean, it is not simple enough to just turn off all of your broad matching. This will cut you off from much of your traffic that you DO want (as opposed to the ones google hands out some times).

-What would seem to make more sense is to first do what you did above, aka use all of those permutations for each keyword.
-Put all of these permutations in broad, phrase, AND exact match (yes trippling your keywords).
-Make sure you set the max bid price for the broad matches MUCH LOWER THAN FOR PHRASE AND EVEN LOWER THAN THE SAME EXACT MATCH KEYWORDS.
**important step next**
-Then, use the “Search Query Performance Report” under “reports” in adwords to see exactly which keywords google is screwing you over on.

What I mean is:

if you sell purple flowers and you have a broad match keyword purple flower, but the report shows that someone searched for the term pink flower and that triggered the purple flower ads…

ADD THE WORDS YOU SEE WORKING AGAINST YOU TO THE NEGATIVE KEYWORD LIST (in this case, you would add -pink to your keyword list)

I am convinced that AN EXPANSIVE NEGATIVE KEYWORD LIST IS THE KEY to dodging this problem. Over time your negative keyword list will get longer and longer but the more you add to it, the more precise traffic you will receive.

Let me know what you guys think!