Question

Does anyone have a practical way to prevent singular keywords from being bid on by Google? More detail about my problem: Googles match types have become broader but up until a couple of years ago, you could avoid all singular keywords by simply not using broad match. No even phrase and exact match will match with close variants. So if I have a keyword [padlocks] or even "strong padlocks" then google will also show my add in searches for padlock or strong padlocks. For us singular keywords don't work well. They have a much lower conversion value, a lower CTR and generally not worth our time. How would you try and arrange the account to avoid singular keywords now?  

Answer 1

If you are adding the keyword [padlocks] then your ad is going to trigger if they search padlock. You can bid on "padlocks" and then add [padlock] as a negative keyword because Google still don't include close variants in their negative lists - because they would lose click revenue of course  

Comments

Yep thats true. Negative keywords work different from regular keywords and they only exclude the exact keyword. In fact, even broad match negatives dont exclude plurals if you add it as singular.  

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@ento48 read my post again. I stated that I bid on [padlocks] not [padlock]

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I appreciate also it is technically possible to add an exact match negative but the number of negatives to cover all eventualities make the task impossible. I begin doing that and after 2000 exact match negative keywords I gave up.  

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@wolsky327 That's interesting but are you sure? I did ask Google about that and they said it wouldn't work. You suggestion of a board negative in singular would solve the problem. I. e. a board negative padlock but I believe that would disable my entire account since all I sell it padlocks.  

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@peat3 I don't believe it's possible to even add a broad match negative, Google just treat it differently. If time is your problem, just use a script in excel to delete the s off the end of any words in the account containing one and add them as negatives in bulk negative kw list? There'll be some extra random S's taken off words but that's one way to save time.  

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@ento48 I would tend to agree with you but that's assuming I've come up with all the potential keyword variants and added them as a positive keyword. The other concern I have is that back on June 20th 2019 I had this debate with Google and they said to do just that. I added over 2500 negative exact match keywords. You would then think that my CTR would increase and quality score get better and potentially my bid go down. However the next day, my Avg CPC was 40% higher. The only possible reason for this I can think of is that google has some algorythm where it doesn't like account used enormous negative keyword lists as it counters their push to make things more broad and automated. Over the years they've move to board match types and machine learning big strategies. Back when I starter Adwords in 2008 it was much clearer. What you big on is what you got.  

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@wolsky327 That is very interesting thanks. So presumably if I just include a single broad negative of padlock they the following would not show: big padlock security padlock insurance grade padlock The odd thing is that I've asked this question so many times of experts and Google account advisors and non of them confirmed this and said the only way would be to generate an enormous negative keyword list not only which counters singulars in my positive keywords but also every other keyword variants i haven't considered which are picked up by my positive phrase matches.  

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Negative keywords kind of have to work that way. It's a good thing because that's all we've got now.  

Answer 2

Exact match doesn’t even control the word order any more. They will happily allow additional words in the query. Match types are a lie.