Keywords can be tricky things.  You think you’ve got the most relevant, robust keyword list on the planet, but you run it through the keyword expansion wizard in Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (MAI) just to be sure no stone was left unturned.  The next thing you know, you’re creating new ad groups and writing ads for a whole host of new keywords you just couldn’t pass up.  Who knew there were so many terms related to your products and services?

Before you start going through your finalized list with an eye towards fine tuning your keywords and phrases to suit your needs, keep in mind that all keywords submitted to adCenter are normalized: capitalization, special accents, punctuation and extraneous articles of speech are stripped away before the keywords are loaded into your campaign. 

Here are some examples of how normalization works:

As for what doesn’t get normalized…

Spaces – adCenter does not remove spaces that appear in a keyword or phrase, so if you put in “video camera”, that’s how it will appear in your campaign.

Plurals – all keyword lists should include both singular and plural forms of all keywords to ensure maximum coverage; plural words are not affected by normalization.

Apostrophes – when used as part of a name (O’Brien) or if it occurs mid-word (Coeur d'Alene), apostrophes are not affected by normalization and will remain in place after being added to your adCenter campaigns. (UPDATE 3/8/10): When used in the poesessive form, as in "writer's block", it WILL be normalized and the result will be "writer block".

Make sense?  If not, feel free to leave a comment with any questions you might have.

Sign in to adCenter | Need an account? Sign up now

Share your thoughts in the forums | Follow us on Twitter | Become a fan on Facebook