AdWords Search Phrases don't make sense

Question

I recently set up an ad campaign for an local independent business through AdWords Express. The ad is basically a link to the owner's Facebook page.

Initially there were not issues and the Search Phrases were relevant to the business itself. In a few days, though, the majority of the incoming traffic to Facebook page came from keywords that did not make any sense.

According to the AdWords dashboard, the most popular search phrase used to find the business is "face bo o" with 132 views and 18 clicks! There also are other variations of this nonsense including "c acebook" with 38 views and 2 clicks and "faceb9k" etc. For now I have disabled these, but I wonder, am I doing something wrong here or is it an issue with Google's algorithms?

Answer 1

First off, I would like to answer your question. With Google AdWords, you have 3 different keyword match types, which are 1. broad, 2. "phrase" and 2. [exact match]. When you add your keywords to your adgroup, if you aren't using "" or [] around your keywords, then you will run into this problem. Here is Google's Exmplanation:

The Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, including synonyms, singular and plural forms, possible misspellings, stemmings (such as floor and flooring), related searches, and other relevant variations. To help deliver relevant matches, this match type may also take the customer's recent search activities into account.

With the aforementioned, broad match keywords could very easily cause facebook-related queries to trigger your ad, because "broad match may also take the customer's recent search activities into account." source: support.google.com

You should always have a negative keyword list with any campaigns, after reviewing the keywords which triggered an ad to display, and determining that one or more keywords will not help you reach your objectives. Negative keywords are essential to a successful campaign.

However, If I am going to try and give the best advice, I'm going to suggest that you change your current strategy to either use a website, or even send traffic to a Google+ page. Here are some considerations:

• if you want the user to interact with your page (i.e. like it, share it, or send you a message) you are assuming that they are already logged in. It's self-evident to assume that many users will not be logged-into facebook at the time they click the ad, which is creating an extra step. It's technically even possible that they may not have a facebook page at all.

Hopefully this helps. If you care to share your advertising objective, I could possibly provide better advice. Good luck to you!