Comments on: Introducing Google’s Ghost Ads

By: Louisa Hardwick

Louisa Hardwick — Wed, 12 May 2010 10:55:55 +0000

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.

By: Jade

Jade — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:58:40 +0000

didn’t know it exist, thank you

By: Oi, Google! Leave my PPC Campaign Alone! - Google Adwords - Click Consult Internet Marketing Blog

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:23:48 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Dan PPCPROZ

Dan PPCPROZ — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:24:03 +0000

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.

By: SirBigWig

SirBigWig — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:24:38 +0000

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?

By: Pay per Click Frustrations - About Pay Per Click (PPC) - Click Consult Internet Marketing Blog

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:11:04 +0000

[...] 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? [...]