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Bing - Punctuation in keywords

Anonymous
2016-04-20T13:52:25+00:00

Hi there,

My client is asking how they can increase traffic to an ad group that contains the keyword say "hello" (just an example). He has three ad groups with similar keywords, for example:

-ad group A: hello, he.llo (exact match)

-ad group B: h.e. llo (exact match)

-ad group C: h.e.llo (exact match)

Through a Search Term report, they saw that the keyword with the most volume in the campaign is "hello". The ad group A with the "hello" term is receiving only about 1.5% of impressions over the last 30 days at $0.05 CPC. The ad groups B and C are receiving the bulk of impressions at $0.09 - $0.10 CPC (even when they don't match exactly the query). They attempted to place a "hello" keyword negative in the ad group C, but it seemed to suppress an ad from showing at all, so they removed the negative.

They want to drive query terms to ad group A. They adjusted CPC bids but they want to avoid competing against themselves. Can anyone please provide some guidance on how to drive traffic to the ad group A when the query is "hello"?

Thank you so much!

Maria

Microsoft Advertising | Manage ads | Manage campaigns

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous
2016-04-20T19:43:03+00:00

Hello María PaulaStacchiola,

This is a great question. Using your examples, it looks like these keywords are already competing against themselves assuming that the ad groups are using the same targeting and the only difference are keywords like “hello”, “he.llo”, and, “h.e.llo” that are essentially running as duplicate keywords*.* This is because the punctuation (.) is ignored and three of your four keyword examples are being normalized as “Hello” (explained more in detail here), the only exception is the keyword ““h.e. llo” which will be normalized as “he llo”.

It sounds like the best idea in this case may be to condense “Hello” and “He llo” and additional variations of this keyword within the same ad group since it sounds like all three ad groups are using the same targeting settings.

This will prevent the keywords from competing against each other plus it will avoid having duplicate keywords within the same ad group as well. If the ad group’s targeting options are not the same as, or overlapping each other, it may boil down to the actual searches from your designated areas as well other factors such as CTR and other competitors bidding on your same keywords within your intended areas.

I would usually only suggest using the same keywords in different ad groups with similar targeting only if you intend to compare the performance of the same keyword across each match type (an ad group for phrase, and ad group for exact, and an ad ad group for broad). 

If you have any additional questions I would highly recommend contacting our support team since we cannot go into account specifics on our public forums. You may contact us at 1-800-518-5689 so that we can go over you or your client’s account in detail.

Thank you for choose Bing Ads!

Darin P.

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-04-20T20:47:35+00:00

    Hi Darin,

    This is great insight and I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. I'll reach out to the support team with additional questions.

    Thank you again!

    Maria

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