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Brand and competitor terms

Define brand, competitor, and unrelated terms to control how AdTrix handles specific search terms. These terms filter harvest recommendations, auto-negate keywords in new campaigns, and classify campaigns as branded or unbranded in reports.

Prerequisites

How it works

AdTrix uses case-insensitive substring matching to check search terms against your defined terms. If a search term contains any of your terms as a substring, it matches.

Example: If you add "Bigwig Prints" as a brand term, the search term "funny bigwig prints poster" matches because it contains the substring "bigwig prints."

The same term can exist in different categories. For example, you could add "AcmeCo" as both a brand term and a competitor term. However, duplicate terms within the same category are not allowed.

Three term categories

The page displays three panels, one for each category:

CategoryPurpose
Brand termsYour own brand names and variations
Competitor termsCompetitor brand names
Unrelated termsKeywords unrelated to your products

Each panel shows a count badge with the number of terms defined.

Manage terms

Add a term

  1. Type a term in the text field at the top of any panel
  2. Press Enter or click the + button to add it

The term is trimmed of whitespace and added to the list immediately.

Add multiple terms

To add several terms at once, paste a list of terms separated by line breaks into the text field. Each line is added as a separate term. Duplicates are silently skipped.

Delete a term

Hover over a term to reveal the X button on the right. Click it to remove the term immediately.

Duplicates

Adding a term that already exists in the same category shows an error: "Term '[term]' already exists as a [type] term." The error clears automatically after 5 seconds. This check is case-insensitive — "mybrand" and "MyBrand" are treated as the same term.

Where terms are used

Harvest & Negate

Any harvest recommendation containing a matching term is automatically excluded. This applies to all three data sources: Search Term Report, Search Query Performance, and Amazon Recommendations.

You can control which term types are active in Harvest & Negate settings:

  • Negate Branded Terms — filters recommendations matching your brand terms
  • Negate Competitor Terms — filters recommendations matching competitor terms
  • Negate Unrelated Terms — filters recommendations matching unrelated terms

All three toggles default to on. To manage your terms directly from the Harvest & Negate page, click Manage Terms in the settings panel to open the terms drawer.

Campaign Creator

The Campaign Creator has the same three negate toggles in its Negations tab. When a toggle is enabled, the corresponding terms are added as negative keywords to new campaigns you create. These toggles default to off in Campaign Creator.

Click Manage Terms in the Negations tab to open the terms drawer.

Custom Reports

Brand terms are used to classify your campaigns in Custom Reports widgets. Campaigns with targets that contain a brand term keyword are classified as Branded; all others are Unbranded. This powers the branded vs. unbranded performance comparison widgets.

What's next