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Last week we showed you how to avoid common mistakes when setting up your adCenter campaigns and how best to use distribution settings. This week we’re following on from this, with a best practice guide on avoiding negative keyword conflicts to ensure your ads get maximum coverage.
For a background on how adCenter negatives compare to other search engines, you may want to read Kate’s blog: Understanding Negative Keywords for Paid Search Success
What is a negative keyword conflict?
A negative keyword conflict occurs when you are bidding on a particular keyword, but that phrase (or a word within that phrase) is also in your negative keyword list. This will result in your ad not displaying.
Example
Keyword: cheap car insurance
Negative: cheap
Result: ad doesn’t display
How do I know if I’ve got negative keyword conflicts?
A new feature within adCenter makes finding negative keyword conflicts easy. To find negative keyword conflicts using the adCenter web UI, simply choose the “negative keyword conflict” report from the Reports tab as below.
Next, open up the report in Excel. You will see the keyword that has been blocked, along with the negative keyword and the conflict level.
How do I resolve these negative keyword conflicts?
The best way to resolve these negative keyword conflicts is by deleting them. If you only have a few conflicts the easiest way of doing this will be selecting “edit campaign settings” and removing these manually as below
If you have multiple negative conflicts however you are best to remove these using adCenter desktop. First, copy the table below in to Excel and copy in your campaign name and associated negative keyword to delete.
Type
Status
Campaign
Negative
Campaign Negative Keyword
Deleted
Example Campaign
Example Negative
Finally, import this sheet in to adCenter Desktop as below. This will delete the relevant negative keywords and once synced, will resolve the negative conflicts.
Summary
Surprisingly, negative conflicts occur more often that you might think and it’s worth checking your account for errors. The steps above help you resolve these conflicts quickly and easily and will ensure that all your ads are appearing as often as they should. If you have any questions feel free to leave us a comment below.
Read also Tom's previous blog post:
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This feature would be helpful if it was working properly. It looks like it doesn't quite understand exact match negatives yet and will show a conflict when it really isn't the case. So advertisers, be aware that this currently only works in both the UI and Desktop for phrase match negatives.
Hi Jessica. We are aware of some potential issues with the report, exact match negatives have only recently been added and the report is yet to be updated to reflect this. We do however hope to resolve this issue as soon as possible. Thanks for your feedback!
Glad I finally found this info. I thought I was losing my mind, looking at exact match negative keywords and going "where's the conflict?!?!?"
I can't understand how a company like Microsoft can allow this to happen and then doesn't have the ability to fix it immediately. I would like to be able to spend more on Bing/Yahoo, but the interface is so poor I can't run my campaigns efficiently as compared to Google. Step it up MSFT
Here's a related issue. I keep having keywords flagged with a negative keyword conflict at the campaign level. However, even when I delete these keywords at the campaign level, the negative conflicts still say the same thing.
E.g.
Keyword = "John likes cake". Campaign Negative = [cake]. Conflict = [cake] at the campaign level.
I delete [cake] from the campaign level negative keyword list. Return to the ad group. The conflict is still there. But now there is no [cake] for there to be the conflict it says there is. What's going on???
The negative keyword conflict tool doesnt currently recognise exact match negatives. Therefore you can ignore any conflicts on exact match negatives (those with square brackets) such as your example above. This is due to be fixed shortly.