Through some sort of targeting accident, they could appear sporadically. But Was This Intentional?Īlternatively, there's the possibility that the advertisers didn't intend to advertise on the keyword.

Why would the advertiser spend time creating an ad that would only run once? They wouldn't. That's not something we're likely to come across by pure accident. After all, one manual search on a popular branded keyword showed two prominent ads from software download sites. Of course, it probably comes as no surprise that this wasn't a random find. So it's likely that both advertisers started placing similar ads even earlier. In fact, I had actually limited my monitoring to a narrow set of keywords. The second advertiser, .com, has been showing ads since April 13th at the latest. The first advertiser,, has actually been showing ads since February 11th at the latest. Here's what else I started to find: This Definitely Wasn't an Isolated IncidentĪfter looking back through some BrandVerity data from a test account that I set up a while back, I found numerous examples of both these advertisers placing ads on Google for Firefox-related keywords. So, I started combing through the results. This particular set of monitoring covered a number of software brands, including Firefox. Why was this happening? Was this just a one-off incident that I happened to stumble across-or was it part of a bigger trend? Curious about these questions, I looked back to some monitoring that I had set up a while back. Using pushy language that doesn't seem consistent with the Mozilla brand.Describing the promoted version as 'Official' in ad copy.Using the registered trademark symbol (®) in ad copy.Between them, we see a number of interesting tactics:

The ads were also pretty bold in their approach. Not just one, but a pair of ads promoting Firefox downloads at the top of Google's results. The first results I saw, right at the top of the page, were ads placed by third-party download sites.

What is mozilla firefox target