Introducing Google’s Ghost Ads
March 12th, 2008 by Click Consult
For anyone with a large Google PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign, you may have gone to a lot of time and effort to split out and break down your ad groups as much as possible. Having just one common keyword theme in your ad group (for example, used books, cheap used books, used books UK, used books online, buy used books etc) and bespoke ad text that is unique to the ad group is strongly recommended by Google and one of the fundamental ways to make PPC advertising successful. It goes without saying that if someone is searching Google for ‘used books’ they don’t want to see a sponsored links ad for ‘new books’.
This is why what I now call ‘Google Ghost Ads’ are so annoying. Ghost ads are ad text that freely move between ad groups no matter how well segregated your ad groups are. It doesn’t matter if your used books ad belongs to the used books ad group, they will break free of ad group barriers and appear for other unrelated searches, such as ‘new books.’
Why do they do this? The answer is Google’s closely guarded, much vaunted Quality Score algorithm. If one ad has a higher Quality Score rating than another, then it can wander between searches and appear for any keyword in your campaign. Negatives on an ad group level can help, but unless you conduct searches for every keyword in your account, you never know what is appearing for what in Google’s search results. Furthermore, this considerable task must be carried out frequently because Quality Score ratings are always changing and never static.
The fact that you can have God knows what ad appear for God knows what keyword search is very worrying. The sooner Google takes action to stop ghost ads floating out of their ad group jail cells and into other searches that have nothing to do with them, the better!
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[...] Ghost Ads – an office title for when ads are being served by a separate ad groups in a campaign. Solution is to drill your negatives down to be ad group specific. It does beg the question, why spit your campaign into separate ad groups if the highest quality ad is going to be served? [...]
I have never come across this before and I cannot find any other literature on it? Do you have any examples, are you saying that Google migrates ad texts across an account?
most likely this is caused by broad kws having a higher qs from a different adgroup, not as you perceived.
probably adding more adgroup negatives would prevent this phenomenon, as well as google enabling and opt out of expanded match on broad.
[...] Most annoyingly of all, Google overrides the way you segregated your ad groups with their ‘Ghost Ads‘. These are ads that break out of their ad group to show for other ad group keywords, whether [...]
didn’t know it exist, thank you
Yes – I’ve seen this happening on some client campaigns too. I put it down to a competiting keyword featuring across the ad groups.
I would say that it would be detrimental to Google’s reputation for rigorous testing and product quality to display ads independently of the ad group, purely based on the Quality Score algorithm, but I recently came across a ridiculous instance where the search term ‘lawnmower installer’ was triggering our ads for [broad match] security installer.
Now I was led to believe broad match meant all those words, in any order, in the search query – not just one of the words. Otherwise you’d see Google ads appearing for Blue Widgets just because you typed ‘blue moon’ into the search box.
All in all – not sure I trust Google to make rational decisions anymore when it comes to Adwords.