Duplicate (or similar) keywords

When you have duplicate keywords, you don't have control over which keywords the clicks go to, and hence your optimization efforts will not be as efficient. You will see an alert on your dashboard (Audit Alerts / Keywords) whenever there is a duplicate keyword.  Adalysis also provides you with the tools to identify and fix this issue quickly.

There can be 2 different types of alerts, depending on whether the duplicate keyword is in the same ad group or in different ad groups. Our algorithm can detect all types of duplication even when the word order is different (in case of the broad match).  

1. Duplicate keywords within a campaign:  this may lead to keywords competing against each other and not always showing the most relevant ad for a keyword.

2. Similar broad match keywords within an adgroup: although this does not lead to relevancy issues like duplicate keywords in different ad groups, the data gets diluted between the different keywords and optimization becomes more difficult.

In both cases clicking on the alert will take you to the list of sets of duplicate or similar keywords. In both cases, it's worth solving these issues by only leaving the most relevant keyword to run of each set.

You can do this in one of the 2 ways: 

• Manually pausing irrelevant keywords 
• Pausing irrelevant keywords in bulk 

Manually pausing keywords 

To help you make the decision on which keywords should be paused, you will have all the necessary performance metrics, Quality Score, as well as active ads next to each keyword. As a rule of thumb, you will want to leave one best performing keyword per each set of duplicates and pause all others. To pause/remove the unwanted keywords, use the commands on the left of each keyword. 

Pausing keywords in bulk 

Alternatively, you can solve duplicate keyword issues in bulk using the bulk pause tools. Select the sets of duplicates / similar keywords you want to work with and click on the Similar Keyword Bulk Pause Tool (in the alert for similar keywords) or Duplicate Keyword Bulk Pause Tool (in the alert for duplicate keywords). 

You will then select various criteria specifying which keywords to pause, such as keywords with the lowest impressions, lowest conversion rate, highest first-page bid, etc. 

Note: When keywords get paused, it can leave an ad group with no keywords (assuming there was only one active keyword when the duplicate issue was found). You can select to pause such ad groups to make account maintenance easier.