Check this out .... I just found out that Google runs your ads for phrases that it considers to be related or similar to the ones you've specified. Specifically, I purchased "project management software" and my ads were showing up for "project planning software", even though I had not specified this alternate term anywhere in my account. Now, I can understand showing you ad for plurals or misspellings, but for concepts that Google deems "similar"? Ridiculous! When I called AdWords to complain, the very nice customer service rep said that there was nothing she could do; it's part of their terms of service for broad matches. Am I crazy for thinking this is ethically wrong?
wow, this is really someting I haven't heard of. I don't like it one bit either, google is always based off of keyword specific searches. Doing that to me is definetlely wrong, since one word difference in google make the search completely different
Did you purchase the keywords "project software" or "planning software"? If so the broad matching makes sense.
No offense, but this is stupid. Google knows what they are doing. They have the biggest ad network for a reason. If they did this and it caused all their advertisers to lose money, they wouldn't do it. Because if advertisers felt they were wasting money they wouldn't advertise with adwords anymore, and that would suck for Google. Its their software, if you don't like it move somewhere else, but guess what...most ad networks do this...and its a good thing!
if you know the certian words that its showing up for that you dont want it to show up for then add those keywords to your campaign with "-" infront of them so for eg your keywords will look like this: project management software -project planning software the "-" is a negative - counts as an exclude.
I think your keywords are on broad match so will appear for any search that has any of your keywords in it. For example someone could search for Microsoft Project and your ad would appear, maybe not as high as others because its not as relevant as other ads. There is an option to put exact match on in edit campaign settings i think, alternatively you can put [] on the keywords you want on exact match in edit keywords. This will solve your problem and should give you more quality traffic.
no, there isn't another explanation for this: Google do actually run your ad for 'related' terms. My particular problem - let's say that I was an affiliate for ACME Red Widgets. Their PPC policy states that affilates can't bid on brand terms, so I was bidding broad-match on: Red Widgets But my ad was also showing against searches for the single word: ACME I queried this with Google & was told that their current algorithm does match broad terms against 'related terms', even if they don't have any of the words you've specified in them.
This behavior is pretty well known. http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6136 has more details. Expanded matches aren't always perfect, but for the most part they work very well. To fix the specific issue you're having, use negative keywords or exact match as others have suggested. The AdWords Learning Center is a very useful resource and well worth reading when you're advertising on Google.
It's no where near ethically wrong. The reality is most people think AdWords is "easy" and instructions are for idiots...so everyone skips the documentation and just starts setting up live campaigns without really understanding what they are doing. As other have pointed out this behavior is clearly spelled out in the AdWords documentation. If you want to be safe just use exact match - then you'll know exactly what word/phrase you're paying for.