Sorry, i couldn't work out a good title for this question and statement. Today, after running an experiment of sorts, i came to a rough conclusion and wanted to pose the question to others to see if my reasoning is right. What i wanted to find out was this: On the Content Network (only), it looks as though Google ranks and displays ads according to the money generated rather than relevance of keywords. Now i know this sounds obvious, but read what i did (note the keywords are changed to protect me!): If i buy the phrase, "nice hotels in Oxford with pool" and pay $0.05 PC, if that exact phrase appears on a page, my ad will not appear and other less related ads will. The chances of them paying for my phrase are near nil (trust me, i did some stupid phrases on specific sites just so i could monitor). It would appear that people who bid on the word, "Oxford" would appear ahead of me, not because they are more relevant, but because they bid more on their word, than i bid on my phrase. The actual ad in question had the headline "Go-Karting In Reading", the word Reading was nowhere on the page for christ's sake! It's bizarre, because clearly my ad would be fifty times more relevant no? Anyway, do you think this is correct? Has anyone else found anything similar?
It is possible that the quality score for "go-karting in reading" is far higher than yours and they are targeting the site, or "go-karting" on the site triggered the ad. Google's plan is not to make the most money, that's a side effect from providing the most relevant ads (which then get clicked more). Because there are literally millions of ads, and millions of changes each day and millions of sites, they can't have a person go through each ad and each site and choose which ad is the most relevant. Computers aren't 100% perfect. I really think it was go-karting (or even holiday) that triggered their ad, without having seen the site, ad or particular impression.
Sorry, i didn't clarify that. None of their words in the Ad were present on the page, the only relevance i could see was Oxford and Reading being close together, which implied they were merely bidding on the word Oxford. Remember, all my words were present in an exact match! Also, this isn't exactly what i bid on, but the example is the same as my experiment.
Sounds rith Barry. As you pointed out, content is bloody difficult to understand sometimes and QS isn't (if at all?) important as compared to search so then I guess the "how much do you want to pay" comes into it. I've heard that google slowly rolls out/expands your ad through the content network based on wether or not it believes your ad is relevant (even in an obscure way) to the site it is on.
It could be that your competitors are using position targetting and just pay more than you do on the content network... Try to increase your CPC's and if they show up thats the case..