Hey guys, There seems to be some confusion about negative keywords and bidding on "free" keywords for our ringtone campaigns. I sent this all to our affiliate managers as well so you may get this forwarded directly from them, but here is a little bit of clarification, hope it helps: 1) Ad copies and landing pages publishers use cannot contain the words FREE or NO CHARGE. So, in google, an ad copy cannot look like this: Get Free Ringtones Now! Thousands to choose from Click here today. 2) It IS okay for publishers to bid on keywords containing the words "free." This means that bidding on "free ringtones" "free 50 cent tones" etc is OKAY. 3) Negative Keywords - When a publisher specifies "negative keywords" in their campaigns, that means that any search query containing those negative words will NOT display any results. As such, if a publisher specifies "free" as a negative keyword, and a consumer searches for "free ringtones," the publisher's results will NOT be displayed. 4) Google allows publishers to populate their ad copy with the actual keyword that was searched for, so… The publisher creates the following ad: {Keyword} Choose from thousands of the Hottest ringtones today! If a consumer searches for "FREE RINGTONES" and the publisher has the above ad copy running, the resulting ad copy will look like this: FREE RINGTONES Choose from thousands of the Hottest ringtones today! 5) The above in #4 is NOT okay, because the word "free" is being populated into the ad copy. In order to avoid this from happening, for any campaigns that have keyword population enabled, the publisher must create a NEGATIVE KEYWORD LIST - as descibed in #3, so that search strings containing the word FREE do not get displayed to the user. 6) It is recommended that publishers create 2 ad groups in their campaigns to eliminate the problem of the word "Free" showing up in ad copy for ringtone ads: A) One ad group containing a list of negative keywords (such as free, no charge), that auto-populates the search string into the ad copy. B) One ad group that does not contain any negative keywords, that only runs STATIC ad copy, not containing the prohibited keywords. I hope this helps. Thanks.
Great Tip for those just getting going and broken down nicely with tips of how to still bid on the free terms etc.
Alex what if your website actually contains free ringtones that people can download but you also run Azoogle offers.
That's a tough one. It should be fine, as long as none of the links promoting "free ringtones" are pointing to the advertisers. If an advertiser complains to us, we'll explain the situation and they can make the decision on whether they want to be on the site or not. Hasn't been an issue in the past.
Alex, on one of your offers, it says you cannot use any synonym of the word "free". According to the dictionary, "complimentary" is a synonym of the word free. But I see lots of sites and ads using "complimentary" in their advertising and landing pages. Can you give us the definitive answer on this one? Is "complimentary" allowed or not? Thanks, Jon
Our clients have approved the use of the words "complimentary" and "bonus" for promotion of their ringtone campaigns. Thanks.