As you may imagine I do lots of attorney searches. I am constantly searching in Google, Yahoo & MSN – checking on my clients online visibility. Although I don’t provide PPC services, some of my clients do use it, so I am often monitoring PPC positioning as well. Over the last 3 months or so I have started to see a troubling trend in regards to PPC; Client’s PPC ads were showing up in searches, for which they clearly were not paying for and that were completely unrelated to their practice. In the below example, a firm that practices exclusively in personal injury law, Solomon & Relihan began appearing in bankruptcy law searches? Of course, when this occurred I would always alert the attorneys to this, making sure that they tightened up their PPC program so that they would only be found for relevant searches.
However, every time this happened – there seemed to be no explanation. The attorney had checked with their PPC provider or checked their adwords account – it should have been impossible to show up for such an unrelated search. It was not until I alerted Dan Gukeisen, a Phoenix Bankruptcy lawyer, to this issue that I got the bottom of it. Dan of course was incensed when I showed him visual proof that his PPC ad was showing up in divorce searches. His PPC vendor, http://www.reachlocal.com/ looked into it and explained.
It appears that Google often “bleeds” PPC results from one search to the next. The idea being that if you were doing a search for “Arizona Personal Injury Lawyer” and you then did an altogether different search, say “Phoenix resorts and spas” – Google would place adwords from the prior search on that page, presumably to remind the searcher what he/she was just looking at. Perhaps in this way the advertiser gets some click thru benefit. While I guess I understand the theory – the practice raises some serious questions in my mind.
1) How does this practice effect the total number of impressions that Google counts for a particular keyword phrase?? Under this method, its conceivable that every ad is seen twice. Once for the relevant search and once for the follow-up and perhaps unrelated search. Since Google tracks the total number of impressions an ad or keyword phrase gets, I would be interested in knowing if these non-relevant searches are included. This may account for some of the “keyword exaggeration” that I spoke of in a previous post.
2) If an unrelated follow-up search is done, and a click thru is registered as a click, how is that click counted? As a click from the first relevant search or is the click counted as the non-relevant search that it is? I have a feeling its the former, since an attorney might be upset if they saw “Phoenix resorts and Spas” on a keyword report of phrases that he or she paid for.
3) How does the cost per click (CPC) affect this practice? Is Google interested in “bleeding results” from every search or only high dollar ads like personal injury? Do they “bleed” ads from less expensive ads? It does not appear so. I did a search for Phoenix Probate Lawyers (low CPC) followed by a search for Phoenix personal injury lawyer(high CPC). None of the probate PPC advertisers “bled” over to the personal injury search page. In addition, when I went from a personal injury search to a more expensive (in PPC) DUI search, none of the personal injury results bled over. While by no means a scientific sample, I have repeated this numerous times and I have seen a trend.
Of course the “bleeding” of PPC results is a far better explanation than the alternative, that PPC re-sellers or Google were mistakenly advertising the wrong keywords, or worse, that they were doing so on purpose. For this I want to apologize to the many PPC vendors I may have put in a bad light.