Redmond, Washington — Up until now, those associated with the online advertising industry have been working under the false assumption that negative keywords in adCenter work the same way they do in AdWords. However, recently, the software giant Microsoft announced an update to negative keywords at campaign and group levels combined in adCenter.
In fact, some of the recent updates are more engaging such as: the re-introduction of Yahoo Rich Ads In Search (RAIS), also, the changes to negative keyword behavior and the ability to choose specific landing pages per match type. Hence, this would make it so that negative keywords loaded at the campaign and ad group levels would be merge to fine-tune ad traffic. Previously, negative keywords at the ad group level would override the ones at the campaign level.
With abundant of keywords to manipulate the company explained, “If you have negative keywords applied at both the campaign and ad group levels you may experience lower traffic volume, as the negative keywords you allocated at the campaign level will now be applied in conjunction with the ad group level negatives,” Microsoft says in a blog post.
With the release of new ‘Negative Keyword Union’, these inactive negatives will suddenly start to work in conjunction with the negatives at the ad group level, which means you could receive less traffic than you did before.
Thus, the company further explained, “It is highly recommended if you closely review your campaign-level negatives if you have negative keywords uploaded at both the campaign and ad group levels to make sure you are not blocking wanted traffic at the ad group level. There is no change to the 10k negative keyword limits at either the campaign or ad group level,” reads the post.
Surprisingly, this unusual functioning has been wreaking havoc on performance for most campaigns–mostly because advertisers were just unaware of the situation and expected adCenter negatives to work the same way AdWords negatives did. But it was not the case. The company graphically provides the following comparison for how negative keywords used to work, and how they work now.
Here is how negative keywords used to work in adCenter…
And here is how negative keywords work now…
Moving forward with the new union model, the company asserts that you should establish negative keywords in each hierarchy based on category in each hierarchy. You should also employ the common negative keywords at the campaign level, Microsoft says, so they could be shared across the lower ad group. Also, keep monitoring the Negative Conflicts Report.
However, if you always believed that negatives at the campaign level were functioning in union with those at the ad group level, you may now get less traffic, but it could also be of better quality, as all those negative keywords you always thought to exclude will now be effectively applied to the auction, which should mean better CPAs, better conversion rates, but also less traffic to your site (if that matters to you).
The Redmond Vole, also mentioned that CPC prices tend to be similar to text ads, while click-through rates are higher, because the advertiser controls a good portion of the real estate.
So, if visitors to your website are absolutely important to you, then you must make sure that all of the negative keywords that were allocated at the campaign level are indeed not wanted for any of your ad groups. Because starting now, they will count as negatives for all of them, while before they only did if an ad group had no negatives at all.
Lastly, Microsoft is now rolling out a feature that empowers advertisers to use unique landing page URLs for each keyword match type that they are bidding on. The new feature will be available beginning this week within the adCenter UI and the adCenter desktop application. Advertisers will get an email at least a week before the functionality is released to their accounts, and during the time their accounts are being enabled, they may not be able to make updates for up to 12 hours.