what characters can appear in the result of get ideas for adwords keyword planner?

To get new keywords based on a feed keyword using adwords keyword planner, you click the “Search for new keywords using a phrase,website or category” and input a feed keyword in the “Your product or service” box, then click the “Get ideas” button. Waiting for a  while, Keyword planner will fetch many related keywords for you.

You can input any characters in the “Your product or service” box(comma is a special character which splits multiple feed keywords). But do you know what characters will appear in the result keywords? If you input “T-shirt” as the feed keyword, all the keyword ideas returned won’t contain the character “-”. In fact the “-” is replaced by space in the input feed keyword. Likewise, the character “&” is also replaced by space  in the feed. If the feed keyword contains “(” or “)”, the results won’t contain the brackets but the brackets in the feed have semantic meanings. If you omit the “(” and “)” in the feed, you will get fewer results. The slash “/” in the feed also has special meanings. If you omit it, fewer results are returned. In fact only limited characters will appear in the results, they are a-z, 0-9, .,and ‘. Note that all the characters of the returned keyword ideas are lower case. Of course this is the situation where you select “English” as the language, otherwise the returned keyword ideas can contain non-english characters.

If you use Adwords API, pay attention to the commas in the feed keyword. The following way to pass multiple feed keywords is not correct:

$relatedToQuerySearchParameter = new RelatedToQuerySearchParameter();
$relatedToQuerySearchParameter->queries = array(“flower,used car”);
$selector->searchParameters[] = $relatedToQuerySearchParameter;

The comma in the feed keyword will be ignored and you actually query the keyword ideas for “flower used car” which has much fewer results.  To search for related keywords for multiple feed keywords, you should use the following code:

$relatedToQuerySearchParameter = new RelatedToQuerySearchParameter();
$relatedToQuerySearchParameter->queries = array(“flower”,”used car”);
$selector->searchParameters[] = $relatedToQuerySearchParameter;

 

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