If you have a Google rep, you may know of the Conflicting Negative Keyword Report. It is an invaluable report that they can run for you, that basically matches up your negative keywords with your positive keywords and makes sure that none of the negatives conflict (block traffic) to your positive keywords. I recently discovered that one of my accounts had a new feature enabled. A simple alert read, “Negative keywords blocking targeted keywords”.
Bing has a report like this in their UI, and it’s pretty good. But it is a report that you need to download and then take later action. The new AdWords feature allows you to make changes directly in the UI! Plus it gives you an alert if it finds conflicting negatives, rather than waiting until you run the report.
The Conflicting Negative Keyword Tool was only displaying in 1 of my accounts. It wasn’t even the largest account, so this seems like a somewhat random beta. I manage about 10 accounts, so I’m sure it was a very small roll-out.
The alert is similar to any typical AdWords UI:
Conflicting Negative Keyword Alert
The interface is easy to use and you can make quick work of fixing your conflicts. *Don’t just take an axe to your negatives by trusting the suggestions though! The negatives were put there for a reason. This is more of a double-check to make sure you negatives are blocking traffic for the proper campaigns.
- Conflicting Negative Keywords Feature Interface
*UPDATE: I no longer see the interface in my account. According to my rep, the feature wasn’t known to be rolled out publicly yet. So I must have seen an Alpha release. Luckily I used it to fix a few small issues, and got the screenshots in time.
*UPDATE 2 – Friday 10/12/12 – Negative alerts are now in All of my accounts! This includes even more alerts than before. In addition to Negative KW, it shows AdGroups With No Ads, Not Running in Network Selected because…, Campaigns with No AdGroups, AdGroups with No Ads. *The last alerts were for a special campaign which is setup correctly, but still triggered the new alerts.
Hopefully this rolls out in the very near future. It was great while it lasted. I think this makes sense for Google, because of course they don’t want you blocking traffic/clicks (REVENUE). And it is a Big help to advertisers. Keep your eyes open and expect a roll-out and announcement in the near future.
Happy Bidding!