Google Adwords Telling Fibs
December 21st, 2006 by Michael Gray in SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
So which is wrong Google Zietgiest or Google Adwords, either way one of you is lying …
See the top searches for 2006 and look at #5 radioblog. Try and buy the keyword here’s what you get …
Price jacked to $10 and I get told the keyword is rarely included in searches (new ad not paused) … umm does the right hand side of the page have a clue what’s going on on the left hand side?
hat tip to Chris Winfield on SEO Buzz Box for jump starting the process SEO Buzz Box
PS: because I’m sure someone will ask I was buying PPC to send to a music related site.
PPS: Edit according to Google trends Radioblog searches are growing …
Sphere It
December 21st, 2006 at 10:40 am
The Ads Diagnostic Tool is a bit of a gimmick. It’s great at telling if your ad is currently displaying on the first page of search results. Otherwise, the error messages are unreliable.
BTW, did your ad include the precise keyword “radioblog” in the ad text (not “radio blog”)? Did your landing page mention “radioblog” in the body of the page? These days, you’ll get drastically different minCPCs depending upon simple changes like that.
I recently did an experiment - tried a keyword (exact match) in an ad group that it wasn’t a very good fit for. The ad was immediately “inactive for search” and minCPC was $5. Deleted it, put it in another ad group that was relevant and the minCPC was $1. Deleted that, started a brand new ad group that mentioned the precise keyword and the minCPC was 50 cents.
December 21st, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Graywolf-
Is this a brand new adgroup?
We recently had a very similar problem on a word we also knew that the explanation was not accurate for, because we were getting thousands of daily clicks for that keyword already in a different account.
Strangely, we got this message some of the time, and a message saying we had surpassed our daily budget the other half of the time. (Budget was $100,000 and we had spent like $12…)
What our google rep confirmed for us by not denying it, was that the keywords were under human review and had been paused while that occurred. They must not have an under review classification in the tool and it was trying to guess as to why the ad would not be showing.
December 25th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
I’ve seen this before when your ad group/campaign/account is under review; it’s usually a sign that there is a human looking at things.