I got a good laugh from The Daily WTF today. Seems a guy came in late to work at a banner advertising firm and found everyone crammed into the president’s office. The president had done a search on “war banners” and kept staying at Google’s homepage — not even getting to a page that said there were no results. The president and the other employees had spent half an hour discovering that there were no results for ad, media, advertisement, advert, etc. He was convinced Google was out to get him and put small advertisers out of business. The guy who had overslept came in to find the president in a very upset state, but took a closer look at what was happening. The president was using Opera, and had blocked URLs that contained ads, advert, banner, etc. in the URL. Opera then will not load a page with the blocked strings, thus all of the reloading of Google’s main page.
This was amusing, in comparison to what Stacy Williams shared at the Search Ad Buyers Forum at the Chicago SES. Yahoo changed the copy of her ads, did not notify her, and she only found out when her client discovered the completely changed copy. She’s also had keywords listed as active that were receiving no impressions — turned out they had tripped a filter, but she was never notified. She’s had a “technical glitch with the approval process” hang up 60 keywords for at least six weeks.
Stacy also shared her experiences with broad matches gone bad — a bid for “refurbished as/400″ (IBM server) showing for “rebuilt Calcutta 400″ (fishing reel) and “used Sun” showing for “used heat pump”. She found out about some of these by seeing lots of fishy keywords in the server logs. She lists several things you can do to prevent your ads from being changed, and ways to monitor for changes you may not have anticipated.
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