In the past, it was difficult to make changes across a series of platforms in regards to negative keywords. The formats were drastically different, so it took careful thought whenever changes were implemented.

 

Google had the widest variety of options for negative keywords, allowing you to use an unlimited number of keywords and apply keywords at the campaign or ad group level. Microsoft’s adCenter presented a more complicated set of limitations. For example, adCenter only allowed one kilobyte of negative keywords, or the equivalent of about 1024 characters, which could be applied at keyword, ad group or campaign levels.

 

Today AdWords and adCenter are more similar than they were in the past. Both platforms allow you to apply negative keywords at campaign and ad group levels, but only adCenter allows negative application at the keyword level. Keep in mind, that if you choose to apply negatives at the keyword level in adCenter you will still be subject to the 1024 character limitation. It is speculated that the negatives at the keyword level may be discontinued in the future.

 

In AdWords you can apply all match types to negative keywords, while adCenter only allows negative match types on the phrase level. Because of this, you will have to be very careful about adding plurals, misspellings and synonyms of the words that you would like to exclude in adCenter. For this reason you also have to be careful to add all specific word orders that you want to exclude.

 

Another thing to be aware of is how adCenter ignores conjunctions and prepositions (words like about, what, on, or, with, of, etc.) when used within keywords. Knowing this, remember that you can choose to exclude prepositional phrases within AdWords, but this cannot be applied the same way in adCenter.

 

Finally, the hierarchical application of negative keywords differs in Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter. In Adwords, campaign and ad group negatives work in a cumulative fashion, meaning they work in tandem. For example, if you have 25 keywords on a campaign level, and 35 on an ad group level, then there are a total of 60 keywords being effectively excluded for that ad group. They work together so that all keywords cover on the ad group level.

 

As for adCenter, negative keywords are considered to be “cascading,” meaning that the negative keywords will only apply at the lowest level where these keywords exist. This can be at campaign, ad group or keyword level, depending on which of these is the lowest level where keywords have been applied. For example, if you apply 25 keywords at a campaign level, and another 25 at keyword level, your campaign level keywords will be ignored, since the coverage has “cascaded” down to keyword level. You need to be careful to recognize the hierarchical difference in platforms because if you used the same negative keyword application in both AdWords and adCenter, it is likely that your click-thru rates would suffer. This would happen because the negative keywords would be handled differently, and possibly less accurately, in adCenter.

 

The most important thing to remember when managing your PPC campaigns across different platforms is to stay current. Make sure that you stay on top of any changes that may be applied to the rules in AdWords and adCenter. Keep your campaigns up to speed so changes can be made across platforms seamlessly. Using negative keywords across PPC platforms is possible; it just takes a little extra planning and monitoring on your end. The end result of your efforts is hopefully a large number of conversions and healthy click-thru rates.

A lot of articles and blog posts have been written regarding the importance and use of negative keywords and I guess this is just one more, but we took on a client over the last few weeks that provided some incredible examples of two things:

 

 

OK, so let’s use what is hopefully the most outrageous example in this account, but one that should really get your attention.

 

Our client sells package ecommerce storefront solutions. One of the keywords we bid on is ".net store".

 

For those of you that don’t know (and this may in fact turn out to be Google) .Net is a software framework or code that was developed by Microsoft and used by web developers all over the world.

 

As part of our normal PPC campaign management, we run frequent checks on which search strings are actually causing our ads to appear. 

 

AdWords provides a very handy tool for this, all you have to do is go to the Keyword tab in a campaign and click on the See Search Terms button.

 

When you click on that button you will get a choice to look at all terms or selected. In this example I chose selected and clicked the box next to the ".net store" keyword.

 

The next page will show you a report that looks like this:

Incredibly these are some of the terms that AdWords felt were close enough to the keyword ".net store" that they showed our ad.   BTW, this was in just one week and this is only a partial list of these types of words.

 

The second part of this is probably more incredible…at least to me. Larry Winget wrote a book called "People are Idiots and I Can Prove It" (http://www.amazon.com/People-Are-Idiots-Can-Prove/dp/1592404375). 

 

Maybe this will be in his sequel…..anyway, some software at AdWords might have matched up these keywords to our ".net store" keyword, but then someone actually clicked on the ad when they saw it. 

 

Remember, someone types "ross department stores com" in the Google search engine and then clicks on this ad when they see it: