So I have a campaign for Radar Rat, my site selling radar detectors. Well, I have deactivated it for now since it did'nt convert. But when you type in "radar rat" into google, my ad comes up. I clicked on the ad, but it never charged it to my account. Don't know if this is usual, but it was the frist time I have ever seen it happen. I know nobody would search for Radar Rat in google but me, but I was still a little suprised to see it there.
mattevers, The Google Ads Network is quite wide and distributed in several servers. When you do a command in front end (your Adwords web interface) this command is not immediate - it is queued to be provided to all distributed Ad server nodes. What probably happened is that you did a stop command and before a specific node received this same queud command - it received a impression show query and respond to it (showing the ad when you requested before received the stop command). So you clicked the ad, this same server registered all data information and the post processing system filted the click due it is invalid (comparing the click time with the ad valid activity period). This is all theoric - who knows?
Well it hasn't been active in weeks, so I don't think it takes that long to take effect. Also I never bid on the keyword "radar rat" since nobody would ever search for that. Yes, I clicked my own ad...I'm not going to have to pay for it, and even if I did, it wouldn't be much. Don't think that "radar rat" is that competitive..
It should not get so long to desactivate (weeks). If "radar rats" activates your ad, is possible that you're biding for "radar" or "rats" only (just one of the two, not both) that would activate the ad when someone enter "radar rats" - this is just a guess as everything is so strange.
Well, I don't know what the deal is, but I'm not really concerned about the money even if they do try and charge me. I have a hunch that Google maybe doing this on purpose. I don't know the reasoning behind it, but it seems odd that I search for my domain name, and an ad comes up, when I have never even bidded on that term, and have not had an active campain for a week or more. I tried radar rats, but it doesn't come up. Only when I type in the exact two words in my domain... Even more, an ebay ad comes up AFTER my ad. Just makes me curious...