I know that adCenter recently added exact match negatives, so naturally I was excited to use this. I have a campaign level exact match negative for a single word phrase. Yet several of my two-word phrase keywords that include the word I have a negative exact on, are not being displayed due to a “negative keyword conflict”. The whole idea of adding the exact match negative was I wanted to avoid showing impressions on the searches for the single word because it wasn’t specific enough and had a low CTR.

How is a negative exact match essentially acting as a negative broad?

First off, the one thing that’s odd about adcenter is that if you have ad group and campaign negatives, only the ad group ones are used. In AdWords, ad group and campaign negatives are cumulative, in adcenter its one list of the other one.

What I find most frustrating is that there’s been a UI bug for a while that tells you that there is a keyword conflict, when in fact the ads are showing. I’d suggest you first do a search and see if your ad shows up in the search results – if so – then you don’t have to worry about it.

AdCenter exact matches behave the same way that AdWords ones do – assuming there’s not some bug going on.

You can see a nice article adcenter wrote about their negatives here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/product-help/adcenter/topic?query=MOONSHOT_CONC_AboutNegativeKeywords.htm