Have you loaded a list of keywords into adCenter only to find that your output sheet has a list of errors for “duplicate” keywords? If you go through your list and see that the keywords are clearly different, adCenter may not have seen it that way. While the queries “the row boat” and “row boat” appear different to you and me, adCenter views these queries as duplicates due to a process called normalization.
What is Normalization?
Normalization is the process where adCenter ignores certain superfluous words whenever a query is entered into our search engine. This process will filter out “noise words” such as “a”, “is” and “the” in English, and “un”, “est” and “le” in French, to name a few. The words normalized vary by language, and can be found in their entirety here.
To provide one example, the query “How to row boat?” is viewed through adCenter’s normalized lenses as simply “row boat”. Consequently, if you have a large export sheet with a high number of “duplicate keyword” error messages next to them, you don’t have to worry about taking action on this particular error message. The message is simply telling you that the keywords that will match to the query you want them to already exist in your campaign.
How does Normalization benefit you?
The value to the advertiser is threefold:
- Your keywords will match to more queries. Removing the extraneous words and symbols means that your active keywords will match to the normalized queries automatically without you having to worry about loading the instances with punctuation and different filler words.
- You will have less keywords to manage. Loading keywords with the different forms of punctuation and filler words would increase your keyword list exponentially and thus be more time consuming to manage.
Normalization is also blind to capitalization. Thus, “Row Boat” and “row boat” are considered the same. However, this process does not affect singular and plural forms of the words. So, “row boat” and “row boats” are viewed as different entities. This is also true for spaces; “row boat” and “rowboat” are two separate keywords that are not normalized. You will want to be sure to include singular and plural forms of your keywords along with different spacing where appropriate in your campaigns for maximum coverage.
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Keyword Variation
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Example
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Normalized Form
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Extraneous Words
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The row boat
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row boat
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Punctuation
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Row boat!
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row boat
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Capitalization
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Row Boat
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row boat
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Plural
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row boats
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row boats (no change)
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Spaces
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row boat
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row boat (no change)
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The next time you upload keywords and find duplicate keyword errors on your sheet rest assured that your keywords have uploaded correctly and that adCenter has simply removed all keywords that are considered duplicates for you.