Chapter 9 : Creating Effective Ad Groups part 7

Complying with Google’s
need for relevance
Throughout this book, I talk about Google’s obsessive enforcement of relevance
on its pages. The AdWords program doesn’t hold to lower standards.
You might not realize it because of the smooth automation with which the
Control Center operates, but every ad in the system is cleared by a human.
These gatekeepers check stylistic considerations, but simple relevance is
equally important. Don’t attempt to blanket Google with irrelevant ads. Google
will probably stop you — and their prevention would save you time, because
nobody would click on irrelevant ads.
The quality of ads on a search results page is as important to Google as the
quality of its editorial search results. It is all content to Google, content that
is judged and responded to by people searching the index. Google doesn’t
want anything on the page that fails to meet its standard of relevance.

The gray area of trademark infringement
The standard of relevance for which Google is renowned is tested painfully
by some companies for allowing competing companies to place ads on their
search pages. By “their” search pages, I mean pages answering search queries
about that company. The complaining companies claim that their trademarks
are violated, a claim implying that the company thinks it owns the search
results page.
Perhaps the most celebrated trademark case involved an environmental organization
that ran AdWords ads critical of a cruise company, and associated
those ads with keywords related to the cruise company. On the surface, this
tactic might seem no less sporting than attack-and-response ad campaigns,
common in political advertising. Political opponents might hate each other,
but they don’t claim trademark infringement when the ads get dirty.
The problem on Google arises in the very concept of relevance. Everyone
wants Google’s search pages, including the ads, to express a high level of relevance.
When an advertiser reaches across competitive lines to appropriate
a keyword normally associated with a rival, the rival can charge that the relevancy
of “its” results page has been compromised, and the users of that page
(the searchers) have been betrayed. Google is responsive to such arguments,
or at least cautious enough in the early days of this new type of dispute, to
generally accede to requests for editorial control of the situation. In the example
just mentioned, the environmental organization’s ads were taken down
within a day.
The lesson for advertisers is simple: Don’t make obvious crossovers into competitive
territory to plug your products. That goes for affiliate advertisers,
selling other companies’ stuff. You can see this caution played out on Google’s
search pages. Search for a well-known company, and you rarely see its competitors’
ads. If you do, you never see those ads mentioning the competing

company by name.

Using keyword-matching options
Google provides four ways to treat your keywords so that it interprets them
exactly the way you want. These treatments, called matching options, are similar
to the search operators used on the front end of Google. (You might want to
refer to Google For Dummies for a complete discussion of search operators.)
One of those search operators — the quote operator — is the same as one of
the keyword-matching operators discussed here.

The four keyword-matching options at your disposal are
 Broad matching
 Negative keywords
 Phrase matching
 Exact matching
Keyword matching is powerful stuff and sometimes ignored by advertisers. In
the rush to launch a campaign, it’s tempting to throw in untreated keywords
(which default to the broad matching option) and let them ride. Slowed
accounts and disabled keywords are often the result of such carelessness.
Read on to find out about these four important options.
Broad matching
Do nothing, and your keyword is broadly matched to a potentially huge array
of related keywords. Your ad might be displayed on search results pages for
variations of your keyword, misspellings of your keyword, or conceptual similarities
to your keyword. Broad matching is convenient, because you let Google
do the work of researching keywords. With a single word, you cover a lot of
search queries.
On the other hand, broad matches might not work for your ad, and Google is
the sole determinant of broad matching if you don’t balance a broad match
with a negative keyword (see the next section).
Broad matching is risky, and most experienced advertisers use it cautiously.
If a broadly matched keyword is disabled by Google (a common occurrence),
you may put it back in play with a different matching option. Narrowing the
effect with phrase or exact matching often makes a sputtering keyword suddenly
potent.
Negative keywords
Placing a minus sign (hyphen) immediately before a keyword excludes that
keyword from matching your keyword and triggering an ad impression. Negative
matching looks like this:
-keyword
Google recently introduced a valuable feature that assigns negative matches
to the entire campaign — every Ad Group. The Campaign page contains an
Add link for creating a campaign-wide list of negative keywords. That link
becomes a View/edit link after you add at least one negative keyword.
Figure 9-12 illustrates the screen on which you create the negative word list
for the entire campaign. Note the Clean Sweep feature on the right, which lets
you extract negative keywords individually embedded in Ad Groups and reassign
them to the entire campaign.
Phrase matching
Phrase matching uses quotation marks around a key phrase, like this:
“coin trading”
The quotes force Google to match your keyword to queries in which the
quote-enclosed words appear exactly as spelled and as ordered. Google still
broad-matches the phrase to related words and concepts but keeps the
quoted phrase intact. Don’t use phrase matching on a single word.
Exact matching
Putting brackets around a key phrase is the most restrictive treatment. Exact
matching looks like this:

[coin trading]