+keyword
.keyword
keyword#
keyword-
Adwords says these characters aren't "recognized" by their system, rather they are recognized as "spaces" and considered a duplicate of regular "keyword". I find they have different min. bids, CTRs and CVRs and drive different volume...anyone else have insight on this?
girls soccer equipment
girl's soccer equipment
girls' soccer equipment
would all be the same. I got a largely incoherent response in email (I sure wish there were away to get past the initial frontline support) basically saying broad match is broad enough to pick up the punctuation, but if I wanted phrase or exact match, I had to add each one separately, punctuation and all.
The particular characters you mention - I have no idea. Have you tried different organic searches with them?
The AdWords system doesn't recognize most symbols (i.e., non-letter characters) when they appear in keywords. The two exceptions are ampersands and accent marks. I've outlined the three cases below that apply to these characters that are included in some of your keywords.
I. Valid Symbols
Our system recognizes two kinds of symbols in keywords: ampersands (&) and accent marks (e.g., √°). The following terms would be treated as different keywords:
'bed and breakfast' is distinct from 'bed & breakfast'
'sidewalk cafe' is distinct from 'sidewalk café'
II. Ignored Symbols
You may add keywords containing periods or dashes to your account, but the punctuation will be ignored. For example, our system would treat the following keywords as identical:
'-keyword' is equivalent to 'keyword'
'#keyword' is equivalent to 'keyword'
They are not necessarily competing against each other, however, an impression or click can only be attributed to one keyword. There are two cons to having a keyword listed multiple times in an account: first, the data within your account can be skewed because the system does not always place with the same keyword - hence, you will have impressions and clicks distributed amongst the different duplicates throughout your account. This makes it difficult to see how the keyword is performing as a whole because its performance is spread over a few similar keywords rather than just one keyword. The second con is that the keywords with better performance history or even a higher CPC will likely be the keyword that shows most often. Thus, it can seem that '+keyword' has a good performance, however, the keyword 'keyword' is what is actually triggering the ad.
For more information on which ad shows if several keywords match a search query, please visit [adwords.google.com...]
III. Invalid Symbols
You may have already encountered this, but you will see an error message if you try to add keywords containing the following symbols to your account:
! @ % ^ * () = {} ; ~ ` <> , ? \ ¦
mainly with regards to the apostrophe
In addition to accents and ampersands, I've seen that an apostrophe is another character that is recognized differently - in my experience, "breakfast at tiffanys" is not the same as "breakfast at tiffany's"...
I would like to hear more opinions/situations of the [girl's] vs [girls] vs [girls']... If they are all the same, then that makes it a lot simpler in building out keyword variations.
[edited by: SanDiego_Art at 10:04 pm (utc) on Aug. 14, 2008]
girls soccer equipment
girl's soccer equipment
girls' soccer equipment
Wait a couple of hours and use the magnifying glass to see whether ads are showing for all three. If they are, then it's different, if not, well, then it's considered dup. My experience is that the ampersand is the only character recognized.
