How to Quickly Find Duplicate Keywords Using Google Ads Editor

July 24, 2019

If you have ever managed large, complex accounts, you might find that it is easy to start second-guessing your keyword additions since it’s quite possible they already exist elsewhere in your account. 

It may not bother you at first, but over time you could build up a large collection of duplicate keywords, especially if you have multiple people working in a single account. Duplicate keywords are definitely not considered ‘best practice’ for a number of reasons:

  1. They “compete” with each other whereby Google will only show one ad, but it will choose whichever keyword has the highest bid
  2. If you turn off the keyword in one location, it will still be running in another, meaning you could be wasting spend without even knowing it
  3. It adds more work to manage an account due to the above reasons

In order to quickly identify duplicates, I recommend using  Google Ads Editor to locate them. 

The steps are rather easy: first open your Editor and navigate over to “Tools.” Once there, you’ll see in the drop down menu – it will provide an option “Find duplicate keywords,” go ahead and click on that:

Once there, you’re able to customize how you would like to look for duplicates. These parameters you can choose from are as follows below:

  • Word Order: strict or any (an example for ‘any’ could be: buy shoes = shoes buy)
  • Match types: same or different (even negatives)
  • Locations: same ad group, same campaign, or across selected campaigns
  • Optional hide duplicates: you can exclude removed and ended campaigns/ad groups or you can even exclude paused campaigns/ad groups

Once you’re ready, you can click “Find duplicate keywords” and you’ll be given a screen that looks like this one below.

To help you quickly determine which keywords you would like to keep and which you would like to remove you can add columns like quality score and CTR.

Hopefully, this tool helps you in eliminating duplicate keywords quickly! Not the most exciting project exactly, but it will only save you from future headaches down the line.