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A WebmasterWorld member is having difficulty understanding how and why she's seeing an overlap of broad match terms within her campaigns overall. She explains that broad match is "kick[ing] in for a more generic term, when the specific term is included in another campaign/ad group, at the same bid price."
Why is this happening? It looks like broad match is confusing advertisers in a big way. As moderator skibum points out, the ad that gives Google the most money is the one that is displayed. Also, if one of your campaigns has exhausted its daily budget but there are still users performing pertinent and another campaign has not reached its budget, you may see some "overlap" on the other campaign to even out the budget.
One way to get around this is to split the match types into separate groups. Applying negative keywords to the campaign can ultimately yield higher results.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Jeremy
04/15/2008 07:01 pm
Assuming the keywords in question are both broad match, the one with the highest QS will trigger the ad. CPC is part of the QS formula but the statement "the ad that gives Google the most money is the one that is displayed" is incorrect.
Don
04/15/2008 11:21 pm
The issue of overlapping broad matched terms is usually due to Google serving ads from an alternate campaign when an impression can't be delivered to the original campaign due to a daily budget cap. I explain this in detail in a post <a href="http://www.serpzone.com/google-serving-on-capped-budgets-negative-terms/" rel="nofollow">here</a>, with an email from Google confirming the process. Google also says such cross-campaign ad serving does not impact quality score, as it is considered experimental.