AdWords Script for Negative Keyword List Conflicts

If you’ve been running AdWords accounts for any period of time, and are using negative keyword lists, you know that sometimes it’s difficult to know if your negative keyword list conflicts with your actual keywords that you’re running on the account. You may accidentally have added something that conflicts, and then you’re restricting traffic or throttling traffic that you actually wanted.

Now, if you’re just adding negatives to the account or ad group level, typically, AdWords will notify you that there’s a conflict, but we actually don’t really do that very often at ParaCore. We use negative lists because we find that they’re easier to manage, control, apply to multiple accounts, and it just kind of creates a centralized location for doing negatives. So, one way to get around that, instead of just hoping that things are gonna work out okay, is to use an AdWords script, and the AdWords script that we use is called, sorry, I’m gonna move my recording here a bit, Negative Keyword Conflicts.

This is the single accounts version. I’m gonna link to this in the description of the video. AdWords actually has a number of scripts that you can use that are super helpful. But I’m actually gonna click on the Manage Your Account version, because that’s what we use, and if you’re an agency, you probably have multiple accounts running. Now, the way an AdWords script works is that you basically can snag these scripts, especially if they’re already done. There’s some source code here. This looks like, this is development code, and you have labels and emails and things like that, and I’ll show you that in just a second. And then, you basically copy this entire thing here, you copy the entire section in gray, and then you paste it into your AdWords account so that you can run the script. So, for example, we only run a couple different scripts here at ParaCore, and these are the main ones. Now, there might be different scripts running on an individual account, checking for different things, but these are some of the global ones that we run.

Now, so here’s the negative keyword conflicts, the master version. So, if you want to add this script, you would basically copy the entire thing. Not gonna do it right this second. And then, you would hit New. And sometimes, this takes a second, so we’re just going to have a sip of our coffee here and wait for the script screen to load. However, one way you will need to do is authenticate your account with the AdWords main account, so script changes on user behalf must be authorized, so you might need to do some sort of authorization. But essentially, what you end up doing is, you take all of this gray, you copy it, and then you just paste it right here, and you do Close, and it’s pretty easy. Now, before you do close, you’re actually going to want to put in some information, some various sentences.

So, I’m gonna show you ours. Or, excuse me, you do, yeah, you close, because you’ve already set it. So, for ours, we have a number of different things that we do. So, when the negative script runs, it actually creates a spreadsheet, and it says, “Hey, we found some conflicts.” Sends you an email notifying you of the conflicts, and then lists them all out in the spreadsheet. And if you have 50 or 100 AdWords accounts, it lists the account, the campaign, the ad group, the keyword and the negative, and how they conflict, so you can fix it really quickly and easily. That’s all done in a Google sheet. So, you need to identify one Google sheet that’s gonna be the holder of these errors and this information, which is pretty easy to do. You just create one and paste the link in. And then, when that Google sheet is added to your account, then AdWords is gonna update it and it’s gonna send you an email. So, here’s ours. You can see there’s a Google sheet right there, and this, so, you paste your Google spreadsheet right here, and then you do the recipient email. We have this sema@paracore.com email. That is a distribution list, so basically, every account manager at ParaCore gets that email. And then, the account label that we use is just Negative_Checker.

So, if we bring on an account, or we start an account, whatever the case may be, and we add that account label, the next time that this script runs, it runs every single day, every account that has that label associated with it is then going to check the keywords versus the negative list, which is what we use basically exclusively, like I was telling you, and then send an email to, in this case, all of our account managers, letting them know, “Hey, there have been issues with this account “or not this account.” And it’s awesome, because it updates you on a regular basis, and you just know if you added something. Literally, within a day, if you added something you shouldn’t have added, you’re gonna be notified about it. We have also used this when we’re auditing accounts. So, if the client approves it, and they’re open to us doing certain audit techniques, then we will actually just apply that label to an account. You’re gonna hit the Run button right here, run it, and then it’ll also notify us if there are any conflicts.

So, this script is pretty amazing. It really protects you, as an AdWords agency or as an account manager, from making any major mistakes. It’ll notify you right away if you have any issues. So, definitely check it out. As usual, if you enjoy the video or find it valuable, please like and subscribe. If you have any comments or questions, please leave those below, and thanks for watching.