I am working with a client that sells watches with the logos of popular sports teams. Keywords in my campaign include "Giants Watch", "Yankees Watch", etc. These keywords are all broad match. I made them broad match because I want terms like "Giants Kids Watch" and "Yankees Velcro Watch" to trigger my ads. Lately i've been running into a problem where people are searching for "Watch Giants Online" and "Watch Yankees games on the internet" and these phrases are triggering my ads. I have added negative keywords to combat this problem but there are 100's of ways people search for this information and it's impossible to catch every instance. My question is this... is there a way to add a negative keyword but only if it's the first keyword in the search phrase? I want to add "watch" as a negative keyword but only to block the phrases like "watch sports online" vs. "buy watches online". any ideas??
> is there a way to add a negative keyword but only if it's the first keyword in the search phrase? No. Not unless there's an undocumented feature I don't know about, but I doubt it. Negatives mean just that, don't show my ad if that word is anywhere in the search query. I understand your problem in your particular case and what you were trying to do using broad matches, but I'd use phrase and exact instead. But why not use online and game as negatives? That would work. And since most people would use "watch giants" in that order to mean you want to watch the Giants (why, I don't know), you could have -"watch giants" as a negative. Yes, you can have a phrase as a negative. By the way, you won't be able to use any of the MLB teams' nicknames in your ad. In fact, I think every major sport leagues have asked Google to not allow their brands to be used in the ads. I've tried before. It just happened to be for a client years ago selling... watches. Wonder if it's the same guy. Does he have an eBay store?
thanks your negative keyword phrase idea may actually work for me. i didn't realize you could use keyword phrases for negative keywords since the google interface says enter one keyword per line. the only issue now is the manual effort to accomplish this will be a pain =(. a regular expression based negative matching system would work wonders for me in this scenario as for the trademarked names i believe that only applies to the league names (NFL, MLB, NBA, NCAA, etc) and not the team names themselves. not sure why they are so protective. regardless it's amazing how many garbage clicks i get from people trying to watch games online vs. purchase watches.