Seen Just Today and Not Available (yet) in all AdWords Accounts

I’ve had numerous conversations with my Google account team about how sometimes you can inadvertently "turn off" a keyword by indiscriminate use of Negative keywords.

Generally, the more negative keywords the better, and Google themselves recommend the use of Broad match with negatives as the best working practice.

That’s obviously open to interpretation, and there’s some advertisers for who that would be suicide. Others, however can benefit from that approach – Search Query reports are essential.

Anyway, for some months now I’ve been talking to Google about the possibility of detecting when a negative keyword has suppressed a desired one.

For equally as long they have said they could not do it either.

When you think carefully about it, it’s in Google’s best interests to help you detect when this happens – since any keyword suppressed by a negative stops Google getting paid!

So today, with a new advertiser account, I spotted a new feature at Ad Group level.

Looking more closely, and at other accounts, I could see that it’s not yet universally rolled out, although I expect it will be.

With this feature, you can see exactly what’s going on with your keywords at a glance, and see all those not delivering Impressions and for what reasons, like low search volume (Long Tail – Beware!!!), or other considerations.

As you can see, not all accounts yet have this feature –