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Matt Burgess posted a picture on Twitter of an ad he spotted on his iPhone when searching Google for [car insurance]. It was an ad from Bing.
How weird. Why would Bing advertise on Google for such an expensive keyword, to send the traffic to bing.com? Arbitrage? I doubt it.
The ad text doesn't make sense either. Lake Japan Look as the title and a description with "this is a dessert no its an island." It doesn't make much sense.
It could have been a mistake by Google AdWords ad platform or it could have been a weird test by Bing's advertising team? I am not sure.
I was not able to replicate it but it does look legit. Was it someone outside of Bing or inside of Bing is unknown.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Comments:
StevenLockey
01/24/2014 02:45 pm
Good chance it was a browser bug. Sometimes on the mobile devices, a bit of one page sometimes doesn't go away when you change to another browser. My guess was he had done a search in bing, then did a google search, and that was just overlaying what was actually there on the Google page. The position of the ad looks wrong also there should be a gap between the grey and the menus. Of course there is always the possibility of photoshop.
supracanadatechnoloiges
01/24/2014 02:57 pm
Agree with Steve. Could be a browser error. But if deep down there if its a delibrate effort then there is a defintately background behind this. Watch Out.
Matt Burgess
01/25/2014 01:58 am
Hi guys, definitely wasn't photoshop. I saw it on both desktop and mobile, mobile was just easiest to screenshot and post to twitter at the time. I am based in Brisbane, but had a work colleague in Sydney who confirmed he saw the same thing when searching. Barry, just an FYI but this was obviously on google.com.au, which may have been the reason you couldn't replicate. Was probably up for a few hours before disappearing.
Matt Burgess
01/25/2014 02:50 am
Ps. No prior searches on bing that could have affected this - but as I say, it was across different devices and showing in different locations anyway.
gopi
01/27/2014 06:31 am
I had seen couple of times those kind of ads, when clicked upon them they will direct user to bing search page, almost all the times i had seen very related titles and descriptions.... so not sure why they used such text. Look like bing team is testing how much time Google adwords take to address unrelated ads.