Keyword Capitalisation & Full Stops in Google Adwords

I have been reading a few independent blogs recently that discussed using capital letters and full stops within keywords can benefit your account with increased quality scores and lower click costs.

I have never used this method of keyword analysis/research before as I believed adwords wouldn’t treat these keywords any differently. I got in touch with my account managers at Google and this was their response;

“Hi Paul,

The Adwords system does not differentiate between capital and lower case letters;

PPC is treated as ppc – the system does not distinguish between the two.

As for full stops, again the system does not treat these differently either.

In some very isolated cases if the word has a full stop as part of its Brand then this can be recognised as distinct, These cases are very rare however.”

So, the following capitalised keywords;

VERTICAL leap

Vertical leap

vertical Leap

Would all be seen as the same keyword, ‘vertical leap’ by the adwords system.

The following keyword containing full stops;

p.p.c

Would be seen as ‘p p c’ by adwords, as all full stops are replaced with spaces.

Hope this provides some clarity to advertisers, I would be interested to hear from anyone who has been using capitalised keywords with any benefit to their adwords accounts.

Related Posts

1. Keyword Symbols/Accents in Google Adwords
2. Create Longer Titles in Your Google Adwords Ads
3. The New Google Keyword Tool (beta)
4. Google Adwords Editor – Version 7.6.1
5. New: Use Google Analytics Goals in AdWords
6. Why You Should Evolve Your Keyword List over Time
7. Google Showing Ad Sitelinks in Adwords
8. Google Adwords Custom Alerts

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 8:15 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.