Every search vendor and media vendor has a solution for Click Fraud (including Catalyst). However, click fraud is not the only source of lost ad dollars. What is tragically overlooked is Google’s broad match tool - and it just got more dangerous. Google AdWords has just made available a new report type, one that reports on the user’s TYPED query. I don’t know why they did this, but this has blown the lid off the hocus-pocus behind “extended broad match.”
A quick look at this report for many of our clients reveals that they have indeed received many impressions and clicks on keywords that they should not be, including
- keyphrases they are not indicated for, not on the keyphrase list
- competing drug, not in the keyphrase list
- keyphrases we have listed as negative keyphrase, for example “X problems in catsĀ; “cats” was on our negative list but it just came up
- words not at all related to “condition X”, they’re just spelled similarly
- and keyphrases that our paid search analyst states, ‘I don’t know how the heck this qualified as a match to the keyword “X”"
We at Catalyst and you folks in pharma marketing should think about the implications of this from a number of perspectives:
- As a reality check about our use of broad match.
- As a potential tool giving us insight into user behavior. (Lots of people seem to use those refine results for disease “x” links).
- As a potential regulatory violation if inappropriate queries trigger your ads
One Comment
Heather - I completely agree. From experience running KeywordMax to my current post at Click Forensics auditing marketing campaigns, one of the main culprits in poor campaign performance is the match type selection. I recommend to clients that they perform a match type risk analysis periodically to determine how to improve on match type selection, and keyword lists.