Spindigg.com - Raves, Rants and everything in between…

You may have noticed that Google has recently made some changes to the keyword tool in Adwords and one of the things that has gone AWL is the negative keyword tool. I really used to love that little bugger too as I found it very useful in quickly finding keywords that may be generating excessive impressions.

Fortunately there is no need to panic… not yet anyway I thought I’d shoot off an email to Google and see what was happening and what I could do now to find negative keywords quickly. According to Google the negative keyword tool is going to be rolled out again in a bigger better and shinier version which some adwords accounts would have seen during a trial of the keyword tool having a negative keywords tab.

I’m not really sure why the old negative keyword version had to go before the new rollout but I guess that’s how it goes sometimes. Here is Google’s suggestion as an alternative whilst the new keyword tool is rolled out.

You may have noticed that your AdWords account’s Keyword Tool no longer has a ‘Negative Keywords’ tab. We
have intentionally removed this tab from all AdWords accounts. Please be assured that the Keyword Tool is otherwise unaffected.

In our commitment to bring you the latest innovations in online advertising, we often release features that are still under development. One of these features was the ‘Negative Keywords’ tab, which had appeared in a certain percentage of AdWords accounts. As often happens with new features, we are going to make a round of adjustments based on the performance data that we have collected. The tab will be unavailable during this time.

We’re eager to re-release the ‘Negative Keywords’ tab in the future. In the meantime, we recommend using the Search Query Performance report to identify any irrelevant search queries that have triggered your ads. Then, add these terms as negative keywords per the instructions at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6635&hl=en_US.

Learn to run a Search Query Performance report at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=68034&hl=en_US.

If you have additional questions, please visit AdWords Support at https://adwords.google.com.au/support, where you’ll find the answers to many of our frequently asked questions.

We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.

I’ve tried the suggested method and I don’t really like it. It might be a short term fix but I find it time consuming and not as effective. You’ll have to hold your breath while the new negative tool is being rolled out which hopefully isn’t too long.