AdWords ads are seen whenever your keywords (and those of your competitors, both directly and indirectly) cause your ads to "enter the ad auction".

This auction is triggered whenever a keyword search is carried out, or a browser refresh.

The resulting ads delivering impressions (being shown on your device screen) can vary widely depending on a number of factors, including budgets, schedules, bid prices, click-through rates, campaign delivery, ad rotation, keyword match types, negative keywords, campaign targeting and networks, language selection, geographic location, device type, and so on.

In fact, to the experienced AdWords Manager the ads which show reveal a lot about the advertiser at a glance, including whether he or she knows (or cares) about what they are doing with their AdWords campaigns.

What you don’t want to have your ads show for are highly irrelevant searches.

This reduces your clickthrough rates and consequently increases your bid prices, click costs, and minimum bids.

This can prevent your ad showing on the front page, or even showing at all.

So, in these days of constrained finances and shoppers looking for deals and sales, we find that Google’s keyword tool indicates about 40,000 searches a month for people looking for a "sale". (This is for the UK).

Not a specific sale, like "house for sale", or "tv for sale" – just a "sale".

Any old sale.

This is shown by the match type of the keyword, which is [exact] as denoted by the square brackets.

That means 40,000 people a month are typing just the keyword sale into Google (I wonder what they’re really looking for? And shouldn’t you?)

Care to guess how many advertisers are competing (knowingly or unknowingly) on that keyword?

Yes, that’s 21,230 AdWords advertisers.

I’ve never seen so many.

Are you among them?

I’d suggest you don’t want to be…

Out of curiosity, I checked the USA also, which is even more interesting…

673,000 searches on the exact keyword [sale] – and 112,502 AdWords advertisers. WOW!

So if you want to know more, just get in touch

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