adCenter’s Kind of Broken

Over this past week, a colleague and I discovered an issue in an adCenter account we manage. Basically, what’s happening is that adCenter is ignoring match types, both normal and negative. Without disclosing the actual keywords, here’s what we found:

There is a trademarked term we are specifically trying to not show for. Let’s call it “red widget.” We’re not bidding on red widget, and red widget is in the account as an exact match negative. Pretty basic setup. Nothing unusual. In the same account, we have an ad group with a single ad and a single exact matched keyword: “blue widget.” The ad is customized to the keyword and is unique in the adCenter account.

Here’s where it gets weird. When a Bing user searches for “red widget,” the unique custom ad we have associated with the blue widget ad group and keyword is being served up. Yes, you read that right: an ad for one keyword is being served up for a keyword that we’re not bidding on and have even added as an exact match negative.

When we first discovered, this I had a hard time believing it; I was sure were missing something. A few other PPC Associates colleagues checked out the account and were seeing the same things. We needed to stop showing for the term red widget, and since it appeared that a red widget query was triggering a blue widget ad, we added red widget as an exact match negative to the blue widget ad group. Not something we should have to do, but we figured it was worth a shot. Unfortunately, it didn’t help. The next step was to pause the blue widget ad group. That did the trick. Five minutes after pausing the blue widget ad group, we were no longer serving a blue widget ad for a red widget query.

Vince, our incredibly helpful account manager, is working with the engineering team on a resolution but as of this writing (12/15) the issue is still unresolved. They recently asked that we reactivate the blue widget ad group so they can pinpoint the issue. We’re making progress but still have no definitive answer. They have shared with us that they believe this issue is limited to our account. That, I do have a hard time understanding. This appears to be an issue with the system itself, not something that we did. It seems highly unlikely to me that an issue like this is limited to one account out of thousands and thousands of adCenter accounts. I guess we’ll see. I’ll provide further updates as we figure out the answers.

Here’s something to think about: if this was (is?) happening in your adCenter account, would you even notice?

- Jeremy Mayes, Account Executive
- Questions? Comments? Email us at blog at ppcassociates dot com.

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