Today, Kate Newton from our London office addresses some burning queries!
Cheers Mel
After a quick poll of the adCenter Team we’ve found out the questions that matter to you the most. The good news is that there wasn’t that many (which means you’re all fast becoming adCenter adExcellence Experts). Hoorah!
However, there are still four questions/topics which are leaving a number of the adCenter Community needing a little more help. These ranged from adCenter targeting and budgeting to negative keywords and bulk editing.
Today we will address negative keywords and the bulk editing/uploading of campaigns using Excel, while budgeting and targeting will be discussed in a later post.
1. How do negative keywords work?
You can help prevent your ads from appearing against search queries unrelated to your website by using negative keywords or keyword phrases. For example, if your ad sells hairstyling products and you have specified ‘mousse’ as a keyword, but you don’t want search queries to return results on chocolate desserts, you could specify ‘chocolate’ and ‘dessert’ as negative keywords.
- Each negative keyword can contain up to 100 characters.
- Negative keywords or negative keyword phrases must be separated by commas.
- Including the commas, the entire negative keywords list cannot exceed 1,022 characters.
If I introduce negatives to my account do the keyword level negatives supersede the campaign level negatives?
There are two ways you can add negative keywords: you can add them to specific keywords or you can add them to your campaign. When you add negative keywords to your campaign, they apply to all keywords unless you add negative keywords to specific keywords. In this case, negative keywords at the keyword level supersede negative keywords at the campaign level.
- Negative keywords that you add to the campaign do not appear in the keyword table on the Keywords tab.
- For more information about introducing negative keywords to your account check out Simone’s blog: Negative Keywords - It's All Positive
2. I want to make a number of changes to my keywords and ads. How do I export my campaigns from adCenter, edit them within Excel and then import them again?
Bulk editing files in Excel is a quick and easy alternative to amending 100s of keywords and ads in the adCenter UI. You will need to request separate keyword and ad downloads for each adGroup you wish to amend.
First, click into the adGroup you wish to modify and click on Edit Keywords...
And then you’ll need to export the keywords as a CSV file and save it to your desktop.
Make the desired changes on the sheet you have just downloaded, save them again on your desktop and then click on the ‘Import Keywords’ button.
For the ads you’ll need to go into the Ads tab and click on the ‘Import Ads’ link
This will give you a sheet which you can then use to create the ads you want. Save it to your desktop as both a CSV or Excel document and then import, using the same button…
Please join me in two weeks time after the Easter break when we’ll revisit adCenter Questions and discuss demographic, geographic & time of day targeting (day parting).
Cheers,
Kate