The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

So you have just compiled a large list of keywords by using a keyword suggestion tool such as Wordtracker, Google, or Trellian.  And now you are trying to decide which ad groups these keywords will belong to, and whether to keep some of these keywords at all.
But your list of keywords is probably too large for you to make these decisions on an individual basis, so here are some strategies to help you identify and group your keywords with ease.

Identifying Negative Keywords
Open an Excel spreadsheet and consolidate your keywords into column A, then copy the column and paste it into column B.  You should now have two identical columns of keywords side by side. Scan your list for terms that you do not want to include in your campaign.  These will be your negative keywords. Once you have a solid idea of the types of phrases or words that you do not wish to include, highlight the entire column B and click on Find/Replace to identify these terms and replace them with a delimiter.

For example, let’s say your company sells sauces and you only wish to bid on descriptive terms that exactly match the products that you carry. You are building a keyword campaign for hot sauces, but you do not sell hot sauces made with habanero pepper. To root out these keywords, highlight your list of keywords and select CTRL+F to find all instances of "habanero". Now you need to replace them with something that will help you identify them. A safe bet might be using a character that wouldn’t naturally show up in a search phrase for your product - such as the tilde (~) sign.  Replace all instances of habanero with ~habanero.

Next, select column B and click on Data > Delimit > Text to Columns and enter the delimiter “~” in the “Other” field.

Click on “Finish”, and all of your terms with instances of habanero will now be identified in column C with a value in those rows.
To remove those keywords, select the entire worksheet and sort it by column C. All of your habanero-related terms will be grouped together and can be easily deleted from your list - but before you do so, make note of these unwanted keywords by creating a separate list of those terms to be applied as negative keywords.

Repeat this exercise several times until you think you have isolated, identified & removed all unwanted reoccurring keywords.

Creating Ad Groups
After you have isolated a list of negative terms, it’s time to attend to the main task of creating your ad groups. Scan your list of keywords and identify the ones you wish to include. For example, let’s say you sell jalapeno hot sauce and you want to create an ad group for your product. Using the same find/replace methodology, find all instances of "jalapeno" in Column B and replace them with a delimiter such as ~jalapeno, isolate the terms by delimiting and sorting the columns. Now add a column to label these rows as your jalapeno ad group.

Continue identifying and grouping similar keywords using this method to create tighter, more focused ad groups. An added benefit of using this strategy is that you will be able to write more relevant and specific ad copy by including the common words from your keyword lists.
Now that you have built out your campaigns and ad groups, consider creating duplicate campaigns strictly for the purposes of content syndication. Check out Trace’s post on the benefits of separating search and content network campaigns for best practices on how to build great content campaigns.

Andrew, Clickable SEM Guru
 
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

Google recently announced that starting on June 15, advertisers will be able to include trademarked terms