Our Rules and Guidelines: Duplicate Keywords for Multiple Campaigns

In our next entry in our series on our Rules and Guidelines, I’ll be discussing one of the common issues that our advertisers deal with, and it’s simply because they are not aware of it: the use of duplicate keywords in multiple campaigns.

Many of our advertisers come from search engines like Google and Bing (Yahoo), where they can run several different campaigns using split testing and multiple ads with the same set of keywords. These search engines are able to support this mainly because of their sheer size. 7Search, as a second tier search engine, has to be able to supervise its network and users in order to maintain a fair and equitable market.

7Search receives requests every day from advertisers who police their competitors. They routinely review their competition and inform us of repeat URLs coming from the same source. This action of using the same campaign several times hurts our business and our users because of the statement it makes on our service. If a user sees a URL in our results multiple times, they may get the impression that we are not providing quality options, or that our results have been adversely affected. If an advertiser views our listings and sees multiple listings for the same keyword, his position is affected, and does not allow his ad to be seen as effectively by our audience. The advertiser contacts us, and we then investigate and make any necessary adjustments.

In order to better assist our advertisers, this rule was enacted to control such actions. As you have seen in past entries, the majority of our rules police the use of our keywords. This is key to the integrity of our results.

Here is the guideline:

Duplicate Keywords for Multiple Pages

No duplicate websites may appear under the same keyword. In order to maintain quality search results for our surfers, we do not allow duplicate URL listings for the same search return list.

This includes but is not limited to:

The websites with the same domain, such as www.7search.com and sub page www.7search.com/affiliate for a more targeted keyword may not both appear for the same keyword. Only one page may be displayed for each search term. Choose the most targeted page for the keyword.

Websites may not duplicate the appearance/content of another site such as with affiliated website programs.

This is a straightforward guideline. Simple and direct, it succinctly spells out our needs. More importantly, our advertisers can do research themselves in order to protect their interests.

You do have options, however. We do allow an advertiser to use the same set of keywords for multiple campaigns. One of the best ways to optimize on 7Search is through testing, and an advertiser can do that in several ways. In order to be fair, they have to conform to the following parameters:

1)      The advertiser uses different landing pages for every campaign.

2)      The advertiser targets his campaigns to different countries.

3)      The advertiser displays his ads at different times and days through our Campaign Scheduling tool, which acts as our version of split testing.

(This feature is available upon request from our client support. We will send you instructions on its use. This can be very helpful, not only the option itself, but will also help by controlling your costs, allowing you to lower your bids at lower traffic times. )

These tactics can also positively benefit your overall performance. You can find what works best for you, and expand from there. Your performance relies so much on testing and gathering data, and the more parallels you can draw, the more effective your results will be.

Overall, we are aware of our playing field. We do allow for the opportunity to experiment within those rules. We ask only that you respect our rules.

I hope this was helpful. Leave a comment with your thoughts.