Microsoft AdCenter Now Supports Negative Exact Match
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Microsoft added a long-awaited feature to its adCenter search engine advertising service. Negative Exact Match, arriving as part of a larger set of improvements for adCenter customers, will allow users to more precisely control which of their ads searchers will see.
Crosby Grant reported on the news for Search Engine Land. You can also find Microsoft's own blog post by Tina Kelleher on its adCenter Blog, explaining the change. The timing could hardly be more perfect. Some marketers might have wished for more time to prepare to before the rush of shoppers searching for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, but it shouldn't take them long to get the hang of the new feature. After all, users of Google's AdWords search advertising service have been able to make negative exact matches for quite some time.
If you use adCenter's web interface, you can already take advantage of its new features, though Kelleher notes that you'll need to upgrade to version 8.1.111 when you see the upgrade prompt in your tool. Keep in mind that this negative keyword feature only works at the ad group and campaign levels; the company stopped supporting keyword level negative keywords. But don't worry; users won't be left completely out in the cold. “In order to make this change a seamless experience for Desktop users, you can migrate your keyword level negative keywords to ad group or campaign level using the Negative Keyword Migration Wizard or in adCenter web UI copy and paste your list of keyword-level negative keywords into an Excel or .CSV file, then import the list at either the ad group or campaign level,” Kelleher explained.
At Search Engine Land, Grant is not overly concerned about keyword level negative keywords going away at adCenter. He noted that most advertisers try hard not to use them anyway. “The non-cumulative nature of adCenter's negatives – adding a keyword-level negative would then ignore any Campaign or AdGroup negatives – along with the character limit (10,000 characters) have been practical barriers to managing keyword-level negatives for most advertisers,” he explained.
Grant also reported that this update will not include negative broad match. That should be good news for at least one poster on Microsoft's Advertising forums. Back in September on the adCenter Advertiser Support forums, a thread focused on negative exact match came up. AlphaProject emphasized the need for a negative exact match with an example featuring two search queries, “ford mustang” and “2005 ford mustang.” As the first one converts poorly but the second one converts very well, AlphaProject wanted to be able to filter out the first one while keeping the second one. Negative exact match allows users to do exactly this.
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