Hi There!

I have been running my Fly London Shoes campaign in Google Adwords for years and thought I had completely boxed it when I reviewed my negative keywords using the ‘See search terms’ tab in the Google Adwords Keyword section.

'See Search Terms' tab

For some reason in the Fly London Campaign, the term [Fly London Shoes] was not showing. I searched and searched for a reason why and eventually gave up, creating another campaign solely with the keywords ‘Fly London Shoes’  This seems to work OK but of course its hardly ideal to have a campaign with one ad group, one ad and one keyword!

I reviwed my negative keywords a few times, seems pretty obvious that if Fly London Shoes had been accidently set up as a negative keyword then it just won’t show up at campaign level! No I couldn’t see that so persisted with the single campaign running.

Now I don’t know about you but I look at my search terms more than once a week and am always honing my negative keywords. Few people realiase that negative keywords act just like postive ones, so we still have the:

London Shoes – Broad Match
“London Shoes” – Phrase Match
[London Shoes - Exact Match]

Broad match – If you use this phrase as a negative keyword then any part of this will exclude a positive keyword with the same text. Any postive keywords with ‘shoes’ or ‘London’ in them will be excluded.

Phrase Match – If you have a positive keyword with this in it then the whole thing will be excluded, so eg if you have [Fly Black London Shoes] then this will be excluded because it has ‘London Shoes’ in it.

Exact Match -  This meanas that only the phrase [London Shoes] would be excluded.

And so I found my cause! I had the negative keyword “London Shoes” at campaign level meaning that my positve phrase [Fly London Shoes] was being blocked! It took me ages but I got there eventually.

So my tip of the week is, look through your search terms and look at your negative keywords because one may be conflicting with the other! Headache over !