Google Eases Management of Negative Keywords, Changes AdWords Display

Google has changed its AdWords interface to allow marketers to use a single negative keyword list across multiple campaigns.

” Negative keywords like [free or trial] don’t require granular management on the campaign level, and we’ve heard from many of you that you’d like a more scalable way to manage these broadly-applicable sets of terms,” wrote Googler Dan Friedman on the Inside AdWords blog.

The new negative keyword management tool is in the Control Panel and Library. Once the list is set up, it can be associated with new and existing campaigns. Marketers can also add new keywords, and the new words will propagate out to all of the campaigns with which the list is associated. The tool allows marketers to create multiple negative keywords lists, as well.

Separately, Google announced a change in its search ads display. Through testing, the company says it learned that click-through improved when the domain portion of the URL was consistent, so it will begin automatically displaying that portion of the URL in all lower-case letters.The part of the URL after the domain name could still include capital letters.

Google is continually testing different display options for AdWords. In recent days, some, such as Search Engine Land contributor and search engine marketer John Ellis, have noticed ads that combined two of the three typical lines. In some cases, the headline was extended to incorporate the first line of description. In others, the two description lines were combined into one. Google hadn’t responded to a request for comment on the probable display test by publication time.

Screenshots courtesy John Ellis