Why are my ads being triggered in google adwords by words i am not even bidding on? For example, in my Awstats i have keywords/keyphrases which people have typed into google and found my site. Yet these keywords/keyphrases are not in any of my ad campaigns. Some of these keywords/keyphrases are showing on page 1. I clicked on one of my ads and it took me to my landing page without charging me for the click. Is this normal? Has this happened to anyone else????? This only happens on Awords not organic search.
could you please provide your site and example of these keywords? a possible cause would be when you use broad match keyword like: dedicated server for a web hosting company and when someone search for not relevant keywords like: counter strike dedicated server or dedicated game server your ads would bring up and normally be clicked after some impressions. if this is the case you have 2 problems: - you are paying for clicks for who are not interested in your site - you are showing your ads for who will not be interested in your ads and they will not click in your ad - this will hurt your CTR% and so this will hurt your Quality Score and so. What would be the solution for this? the solution is not given up of using broad match - but adding tons of negative keywords for your campaign: in this case I would ad the following keywords: counter strike game cs cs2 but i am not sure if this is the case as I told you you need to provide examples.
I think you are correct, my keywords are very broad and all have inverted commas "keyword". Do you think i should delete all inverted comma keywords or should i just add longer keyphrases and keep the exisiing ones?
I think you should add the negative keywords that you see coming up in your awstats and you should learn to use the other keyword setting like: "dedicated server" = matches anything with dedicated server in the text. ex crazy dedicated server hosts [dedicated server] = matches only dedicated server. ex. one dedicated server would not show your ad. I use these two types of keywords and my CTR's are soaring and they are all relevant. I then used a couple negatives, which I will add more when necessary, and it is getting way better!