Stop word rules

Changes

Stop words are auxiliary parts of speech or pronouns that are automatically excluded from the keyword when selecting which ads to serve. For example, for the phrase "how and when to travel to mars", ads will be served in response to queries that contain the keyword "travel mars". The words "how", "and", "when", and "to” will be excluded because they do not carry any additional meaning.

However, stop words can sometimes have additional meaning, and omitting them can dramatically change the meaning of the keyword. For example, for the TV series "In the Heat of the Night", the keyword is "in the heat of the night". The prepositions "in" and "of" are stop words but they're crucial for preserving the reference — if you exclude them, ads will be served for all queries that contain the keyword "heat night".

Previously, to exclude impressions for irrelevant queries, stop words in keywords had to be preserved manually, with special "+" and "!" operators. Now Wordstat does this for you automatically.

How it works

If a user didn't preserve stop words in a keyword, Wordstat will do it automatically. The ad can be displayed for a keyword with preserved prepositions, conjunctions, and so on. In the statistics, such an impression is attributed to the keyword with the word-by-word match type because all the words from the keyword were used.

If a user did preserve the stop words, nothing changes: only queries with all words will be counted in the reports.

Let's take an example

Keyword "in the heat of the night"

Previously, impressions were served for queries containing the phrase “heat night”.
Now, impressions for word-by-word matching will only happen with queries containing the phrase "in the heat of the night". There will be no impressions for queries only with the words "heat night".

Keyword "!in !the heat !of !the night"

As before, impressions will be served for queries containing "in the heat of the night".
Even if an error is made when preserving stop words, Wordstat detects it and uses the correct variant. As a result, nothing changes in the reports, and impressions are counted for the specified keywords.
In addition, Wordstat can now display reports for keywords that consist entirely of stop words.

What happens to "+" and "!" operators that were used to preserve stop words

Special "+" and "!" operators for preserving stop words and their word forms, for example, a singular or plural form, will work the same way. You can continue using them to enforce stop words in keywords. But skipping this step won't influence report accuracy.
Other Wordstat operators will continue working as before.

How stop words will be applied in negative keywords

As before, if you enter a stop word in a negative keyword, this word will automatically be preserved by the system when the keyword is saved. There will be no impressions for queries containing a negative keyword with a stop word.
If you have any questions about the new approach to stop words, please contact support.