Enhanced Negative Keyword Conflicts Report

Today, we are pleased to announce that we have made enhancements to the Negative Keyword Conflicts report that will help you easily resolve your negative keyword conflicts.

What is Negative Keyword Conflicts Report

The negative keyword conflicts report tells you which of your negative keywords are preventing yours ads from appearing for which of your selected keywords. It also tells you whether your negative keyword conflicts are at the campaign or ad group level.

What’s New

Before today’s release, the only information exposed in the negative keyword conflicts report that is related to negative keyword was negative keyword name. We heard feedback from our developers that it is not easy to resolve the conflict without the IDs, therefore, we have added IDs along with additional columns to this report as shown below: 

  1. NegativeKeywordListId
  2. NegativeKeywordList
  3. NegativeKeywordId
  4. NegativeKeywordMatchType
  5. BidMatchType 

These columns are added in NegativeKeywordConflictReportColumn Value Set. To use negative keyword conflicts report please submit the NegativeKeywordConflictReportRequest Data Object. For more information, see Request and Download a Report.

How to use new information to resolve negative keyword conflicts

NegativeKeywordId and NegativeKeywordListId helps you pinpoint the exact negative keyword that is causing the conflict.  For example, if a negative keyword that is used in multiple negative keyword lists is causing the conflict with your keywords and is therefore preventing your ads from being served, then using negative keyword id and negative keyword list id from this report you can determine what is causing the conflict and preventing the ads from appearing. To resolve the conflict you can either delete the negative keyword or change its match type. A negative keyword cannot be updated, so to change the match type you must first delete the existing negative keyword and then add a new negative keyword with the desired match type for a new negative keyword. For more information, see Negative Keywords.

 Note: For negative keywords that are not shared via list (i.e. assigned to a specific campaign or ad group), NegativeKeywordListId will be zero. You can use ConflictLevel column to determine if the conflicting negative keyword is assigned at a Campaign or Ad group level.