Many Bing Ads users encounter this situation at least once or twice – you import a campaign or upload a new keyword set, and some of them are flagged as duplicate keywords. This happens when two keywords in an ad group have minimal differences such as hyphens or accents, and Bing Ads takes out these added characters from the keywords. This is called “keyword normalization” and it’s the one of the main reasons for keyword duplication.

Bing recently announced that they will loosen up the restrictions of keyword normalization in their ad program. This is good news for advertisers, who up until now, struggled with this issue. The ability to import bulks of keywords is one of Bing’s greatest features, so it’s great to hear that the keyword duplication issue is being addressed.

Advertisers would be able to include various keywords through Bing Ads Editor and Bing Ads Upload API without them being flagged. Once keywords are uploaded, users will still be able to edit bids and match types on those keywords.