Keyword conflicts can cause severe inefficiencies in your account. If a negative list contains a word that also appears as a keyword, the negative will be blocking traffic to that keyword. 

For example, if your negative list contains the broad match free, but your keyword list contains “cheese free pizza”, you’ve got a conflict! The negative keyword will block all traffic using the words free, including those searchers looking for your cheese-free variety! 

Keyword conflicts render keywords more-or-less useless, so you’ll be losing valuable impressions and clicks. Google will occasionally flag keyword conflicts, but we find they often slip through the net. 

Choosing to remove the negative won’t just allow traffic to the blocked keyword. Let’s use the pizza example again — imagine you’ve got the  broad match keyword pizza delivery in your list too. Searchers looking for free pizza delivery would have been blocked by the negative keyword free, even though it doesn’t create a direct conflict with pizza delivery. After removing the negative free, searches for free pizza delivery will trigger your ads via the keyword pizza delivery. 

Opteo will scan your account, comparing keyword lists to their campaign's applied negative lists at every level. If we find a conflict, we’ll list the negative alongside the blocked keywords. 

You have two options to Fix Keyword Conflicts. If you’d like to continue blocking searchers using the negative, you can choose to Pause Keywords. If you’d prefer searchers of the blocked keywords to see your ads, you can unblock them by choosing to Remove Negative Keyword.