While doing my usual daily perusal of digg, I found a useful video of Stacy Williams describing some liberties that Google and Yahoo may take with your search engine ad campaigns. This short video (just under 4 minutes) was filmed at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in Chicago, and in it Stacy touches on the following three points:
- Sometimes ads are not active even if Google/Yahoo say they are (because they are actually in the process of editorial review).
- Search engines may change your ad match types (broad vs exact and so on) sometimes without notification. Stacey gives a funny example.
- Swapping of text ad titles and descriptions in certain scenarios.
The moral for us online entrepreneurs is that if you are using search engine advertising to promote your new business, you may need to pay closer attention to those ads than you thought.