Lori Weiman does a good job laying out an important issue that many search markerters have fallen trap to in her blog post on Search Engine Land called "Does Auto-Matching Cause Unintentional Trademark Abuse?"
"Google and Yahoo, by way of the auto-matching feature, can show your ads on keywords that you did not intend to sponsor."
At imwave we have run into this a number of times. With Google they will take your broad match terms and display the ads on competitive trademarks you didn't ask for or know they were going to choose. Running a broad match term like "sneakers" doesn't mean you will only show up under terms like "basketball sneakers" and "tennis sneakers", but they may match your ad up to shoes, boots, sandals, or terms like nike, adidas, etc… At Yahoo the situation gets even worse! Not only will they start displaying your ad under these brand terms, they will actually sometimes adjust your ad copy (without telling you) to include these keywords in headlines so that they get higher click through rates!!! This can be very annoying when you have agreed to follow strict brand guidelines, and then Yahoo decides they know better!
What is the solution? You can stop running broad and advanced matching, but that is going to leave A LOT of opportunity on the table. The only other solution I know of is to work with your clients to establish a good list of negative keywords that you know you don't want your ads to appear on.
I'd love to hear your experiences with this issue.
