Is there something wrong with Google Broad Match?

[kav]

Adwords broad match doesnt seem to be broad anymore.

We just launched a redesigned site and with it decided to make a new account and redo all of our adwords campaigns. We have some rather specific keywords that we have a high click through rate and few competitors. One reason we decided to make this new account is because the last marketer had made some inefficient ads and some words were disabled. When I would go online and search for a broad match keyword with some random other words, often we wouldnt show up. So I was told that if I made a new account then google wouldnt penalize us. So I did that and made sure the ads were relevant and we have a click through rate of around 3%. The problem is that still, our broad match really isnt working like I thought a broad match would. I had to try to ad 2000 keywords per topic to my original 30 just because it seems that the more keywords in the search term the better the chance of us showing up.

In November I also made a campaign using very competitive common terms. With this new site I have relaunched those keywords and am literally getting 1/10th of the traffic. What seems strange is that for some combinations there are absolutely no results though there are companies that have broad matched. google claims that this is because they have seen that these combinations due not get a highclick through rate though I doubt that. I know we would have a good click through rate if they put our ad up.

For instance, if you type in physics you see plenty of advertisers. If you type in physics stuff you see none. Why? Is there anyway that we can get to show up without making physics stuff one of our specific keywords?

Since google is limiting the keywords to 50,000 per account there really is no way for me to get all combinations.

Any idea about what is going on?

Thanks for the help