12 replies to this topic

[powerofeyes]

Hello,
When I was browsing through couple of SERPs I saw some peculiar things, There has been Context matching used(in Adwords) for some typical commercial keywords, For example when I typed "pajamas" google displays Adwords ads with relative context words like "sleepwear" , "night clothing" , "lingerie" etc.
Like this I am seeing for many search terms, This is the first time I am seeing Semantics come out live in google, Is this a new improvement or was there for a long time ,
This is a big improvement by Google, if sematics come into Organic SERPs then it is going to break all SEO's heads, right now we are just seeing stemming live, no big sign of Semantics in Organic SERPs,

So how many of you are seeing this, I have many other examples too,

VIJAY,

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[Fritz]

I believe the matching of ads with search terms is 100% done by the advertiser, so there is no magical "context matching" going on here.

[Grumpus]

There may be, though. Google purchased Applied Semantics a while back and there has been evidence that there is at least some experimentation going on in using some of the technologies in the regular results. They could very well be tinkering with it in the paid results, as well.

Hard to know what's going on for certain at this point.

G.

[Matt B]

From what I understood on the Applied Semantics purchase, part of the technology was going to be used in the PPC to compete with Overture. So, I would tend to believe this is part of the content matching.

[Fritz]

I only know that I just set up my AdWords campaign yesterday, and my understanding is that the display of my ads is entirely determined by my own keyword selection. And some of my ads have none of the targeted keywords in them.

Actually, I would be disappointed if Google is displaying my ads anywhere besides the SERPs for the keywords I selected. I don't want to pay for something I didn't buy. Maybe I am just being to territorial with my very limited PPC budget.

[Jill]

Fritz, then you need to make sure you don't select context sensitive ads, and only ads from search engines in your campaign.

Jill

[powerofeyes]

Hello Fritz,
We run adword campaign for our clients, This is completely new what I am seeing, I referred all over the google Adwords information pages and I cant find an option like this, This is completely new,
Google says Broad matching but that does not imply with this, For a targetted keyword phrase "adidas shoes" a broad matching will be, any combination with "adidas" or any combination with "shoes" but there is nothing like that here,
These words "sleepwear", "night clothing" are completely contextual keywords, so there is definetely a semantics play here,
But as you say simply google cant display limited budget ads using semantics theory but probably these ads are for clients who are willing to go for any over budget,
But I am not sure,

VIJAY,

[Grumpus]

Google's been known to run "experiments" for free, too. When they first started doing the ads on other sites, clicks from those remote ads were free for a time (a week or two, if I remember correctly). I'm also not sure the timing on this, but I'm pretty sure they had it all set up on a bunch of sites and had it running before they announced this -even to the advertisers. (I seem to remember some advertisers being concerned about something, at the time...)

G.

[Haystack]

Google will match ads to synonyms if your ads are set to broad matching:
https://adwords.goog...keywords.html#3

If you'd like more control over where your ads are shown, click on Campaign Management > Tools > Change Keyword Matching Options, then change your broad matches to phrase or exact.

Fritz, as Jill pointed out, be sure to turn off having your ads served to Content Sites if you only want your ads to show on SEARCHES for your terms.

VIJAY, how do you know that the advertisers aren't bidding on that term?

[OldWelshGuy]

VIJAY, how do you know that the advertisers aren't bidding on that term?

It took me until the very last post for someone to state the obvious

[OldWelshGuy]

But I thought we had all agreed that G was using the Applied Semantics stuff for their search? or was it just me

[thx1138]

It's difficult to tell with the results Adwords produces on Google SERPS as you don't know on what terms the advertiser is bidding. However the Adsense program which will put a strip of Google Adds on your site does use Applied Semantic's technology to determine which adds to show, it works pretty well but if it can't determine what's appropriate from the HTML of the page it's on, it will display a list of non-profit organisations.

We use it on our affiliate pages and I'd say it works 80% of the time for us. Maybe there's some reverse engineering to be done here, tinker with a page and see at what point Adsense produces relevant adds.

[Jill]

I had some very strange referrers for my Google AdWords ad...

One of my bidded keywords (exact matching, not broad) was "search results" figuring that it applied to my ad to get people to sign up for my newsletter.

I noticed a high amount of clicks on that phrase, but very few actual sign ups, compared to the conversion rates for my other words. So in order to determine if I should keep that phrase in my campaign, I looked to see where all the clicks were coming from.

Turns out, they were contextual ads on these car sites, where somewhere on the page it would say "your search results for..." etc.!

I turned off that keyword phrase last night so as not to waste money on those! People must have clicked on my ad out of curiosity I guess!

The other phrase that was not converting well was "key words" and I think I was having a similar problem with that. The one word "keyword" wasn't a problem, however, which is interesting.

The beauty of using ConversionRuler or similar!

Jill