‘Dear Inside AdWords…’ – Potpourri

One of my favorite categories on Jeopardy! is “Potpourri” because you never know what you’re going to get. Our inbox also resembles the potpourri category since we get such a wide range of questions from all of you. Today, a few more answers to your questions…

Can I have the same list of keywords for different campaigns? Both of the campaigns contain different ads. I would like to know if both the ads will get listed for the same keyword. –Uma

Dear Uma: While it's technically possible to have the same list of keywords in different campaigns, the two campaigns will end up competing with one another in the auction for the same keyword search. For example, if you have the keyword "potpourri" in two campaigns in your account (with different ad text), the AdWords system will use a combination of CPC, CTR, and other relevance factors to pick the best ad to show. The bottom line is that only one ad per account can be displayed for any given keyword search.

One of your past posts mentioned creating a blog as a means to communicate with my customers. How do I create a blog? I am not sure how that works. –An Inside AdWords reader

Dear Reader: We have just the solution for you. Our friends down the hall on the Blogger team have made it super easy to create your own free blog in just three steps. All you have to do is create a Blogger account, name your blog, choose a template, and off you go. We’ll let them give you the details here.

Can you please tell me what a negative keyword is? Can you give some examples of them? --Prakash

Dear Prakash: We discussed negative keywords a while ago in a post, but as a quick recap, they are essentially keywords for which you do not want your ads to show. For example, let’s say your store sells flowers, but you do not carry wreaths or plants. You would probably want to choose '-wreaths' and '-plants' as negative keywords so that ads for your store do not show when a user types in these search terms. (The hyphen in front of the word indicates that you want to choose it as a negative keyword.)

Thanks for all your great questions! Keep them coming and we’ll keep answering them here on Inside AdWords.

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew