The 5 strangest search terms in 2,000+ AdWords accounts

Over the past two years, my team and I have audited more than 2,000 AdWords accounts. While auditing all of those accounts, we saw a lot of search term reports.

Some search terms were good, some were a waste of money and some… were simply strange.

These search terms are a perfect example of how a poor keyword strategy can result in your ads showing up for unpredictable searches… and waste thousands of dollars in the process.

Here are five of the strangest search terms of 2015:

1. “Whack your boss”

Our first search term comes from a campaign targeting women interested in starting their own business.

Unfortunately, the campaign targeted the phrase-match keyword “boss,” which meant that their ads ended up displaying when people typed in “whack your boss.”

What’s astonishing is that this search term had more than 30,000 impressions and 1,719 clicks.

Clearly, a lot of people are frustrated at work.

Unfortunately, since the company didn’t offer anger management services, they didn’t get a single conversion from those 1,719 clicks.

Now, I suppose that wanting to whack your boss might make you want to start your own business, but in this case, “whack your boss” wasn’t attracting the right sort of traffic.

In fact, this search term cost the company more than $3,000 — a truly whack-worthy offense!

Moral of the story: Bidding on phrase-match single keywords is a bad idea.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]