Structured Negative Keywords & Negative Keyword Lists, now Live.

In May we announced the availability of a refreshed set of features across our suite of APIs in Sandbox. Today we are very excited to announce the general availability of the Structured Negative Keywords and Negative Keyword Lists features in our V9 Campaign Management Service, which means all our developers can code against these new capabilities for their API clients. Thanks to our developers, these features were the direct results of all your feedback.

Structured Negative Keywords

Developers have told us that managing negative keywords has been particularly challenging because API clients would have to manipulate an array of strings in our API. Previously your client would have to download the entire array of negative keywords, make your modification and then replace the entire array. This method becomes inefficient for simple use cases such as adding or removing one negative keyword. With this release have made Negative Keywords a first class entity complete with its own set of create, read, and
delete operations to help manage your negative keywords as simple as any other object in the Campaign Management Service. You can now manage one or more of the negative keywords with these operations AddNegativeKeywordsToEntities, DeleteNegativeKeywordsFromEntities, GetNegativeKeywordsByEntityIds and these operations make it easier to add or remove specific negative keywords without having to operate on an array of strings. This change, still allows you to manage negative keywords at both the campaign and ad group level.

We also ensured that the new methods are backward compatible to our previous model of managing negative Keyword management through these APIs GetNegativeKeywordsByAdGroupIds, GetNegativeKeywordsByCampaignIds, SetNegativeKeywordsToAdGroups and SetNegativeKeywordToCampaigns. We’ve already heard that many developers would welcome this improvement and as a result we plan on deprecate the old methods in the next version of our API. It’s now recommended that API clients should use these new methods to implement negative keywords as they’ll be more efficient and performant for your implementation.

Negative Keyword List

We are also introducing the ability to create up to 20 negative keyword lists per account, which can then be associated to one or more campaigns. This helps you manage negative keywords across multiple campaigns and it saves you from duplicating the negative keywords in every campaign. Negative keyword lists effectively adds any new negative keywords that are not already directly applied to the campaign. In other words, the entire set of the negative keywords on a particular campaign is the union of a shared negative keyword lists, combined with any negative keywords directly applied on the campaign. 

You can manage negative keyword lists by using the NegativeKeywordList entity. Start by creating a list by calling the method AddSharedEntity. Once created you can associate it to a campaign via SetSharedEntityAssociations. For more details on how to manage negative keyword lists, please see the reference section on negative keywords.

We are really excited about this API refresh and the new capabilities in our developer platform. As always, we would love for developers to provide their feedback on our APIs.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them in the comments below.