AdWordsAdvisor - 1:12 am on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

When I use the keyword suggestion tool I sometimes just copy all them keywords to my campaigns. Later on I start refining campaigns to get rid of the junk and to add negative keywords and stuff.

humblebeginnings, contrary to popular belief, AdWords does not actually offer a keyword suggestion tool. ;)

What we do offer is a keyword tool which gives advertisers lists of keywords which are related to the keyword that they've entered, so that they may make an informed decision as to which of the keywords to use, which to not use, and which might even need to become negative keywords.

Quoting from the tool's results page, with bolding added:

These are popular queries that include your keyword. If you're showing your ads on broad-matched keywords, these queries may trigger your ads. To increase your clickthrough rate, you should consider replacing your general keywords with any relevant, more specific alternatives you see here. You should also identify any irrelevant terms and add them as negative matches (otherwise your ads will show for terms that don't pertain to your business).

In any case, I would strongly recommend against simply pasting the entire list into your Ad Group. In a very real way this is giving away some of your control over your ad's performance, which is something that you want to control as closely as you possible.

Bottom line, I wouldn't recommend using keywords that are not highly related to the subject of your ad.

Thought I read somewhere that G penalizes you for having dirty keywords in your list... AWA, can you comment on this?

Keywords which are 'disapprovable' depend a lot on the context in which they are used. So this is the sort of question that would be best answered by AdWords support, who can see that context.

That said, any keywords which are not highly related to the subject of your ad have the potential to lower your ad performance - not to mention bringing you 'window shoppers' as opposed to 'pre-qualified customers'.

AWA