• Seer Interactive , Friday, June 13, 2008 2:45 PM

Why are the search engines so reluctant to reveal the rationale behind their keyword matching options? Perhaps because advertisers would revolt if they found out the random terms their ads were being matched to. Such was the case when Google released the Search Query Report last year. It showed how broadly queries and ads were being thrown together, and advertisers responded by building long lists of terms they didn't want to be matched to.

Enter the Yahoo Search Query Report--an eye-opener that may or may not be available, depending on which YSM account rep you speak to. Bonnie Schwartz managed to get one and found out that a long-tail query she'd been bidding on (a four-word strand that contained the term "online") was being matched to all queries for the word "online."

"Yes, you read that correctly, my ads were actually showing for the term online," Schwartz says. "To pour salt on this wound, the client the report was pulled for was in a very competitive PPC landscape where each click had the potential to spend up to $10."

Schwartz quickly added "online" to her list of negative keywords, but had she not seen the report, there would have been no way to potentially save the client from a high volume of low-quality, expensive clicks.

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