AdWords Embedded Match – What Else Aren’t They Telling Us?
Keywords April 7th, 2008A reader wonders: The other day I heard the term "embedded match" for Adwords for the first time. Is this something totally new and are there any other matching options not of common knowledge?
My pithy, punctuationally-challenged reply:
-[keyword] is embedded match – just a combo of negative and exact
Say you sell whiteboard accessories and supplies, and you want your ad to appear for
whiteboard cleaner
whiteboard marker
whiteboard eraser
but not
whiteboard
whiteboards
because you don’t sell whiteboards. (Dude, you should sooo sell whiteboards. But that’s another topic…)
So you add
-[whiteboard]
and
-[whiteboards]
to your keyword list
Voila, you’ve just created an embedded match.
As far as I know, there are no other secret match types in AdWords.
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April 8th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Howie,
I am so confused. Google says I can bid on a competitor’s trademark so long as the trademark doesn’t appear in the ad text, but the competitor just had their lawyer send me a letter telling me to stop.
Do you know what the trends are over the past few years when it comes to bidding on someone else’s trademark? Is it going strong, or are people backing off due to legal pressure or some other reason.
Thanks Howie!
April 8th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Greg – the short answer: nobody knows what the rules are in the Online Wild West.
Here is a story from January about one advertiser suing another for copyright infringement. The reason: the defendant bid on the plaintiff’s name as a Google keyword.
And here’s a recent article about rescuecom’s appeal in a similar lawsuit.
So what’s the answer? Stay tuned…