Determining if a Keyword is Adult or Non-Adult

[Charles Michael]

Hello, I'm looking to split my keyword lists (100K+ keys) into an adult and non-adult list in order to avoid bidding on keywords that Google might not recognize as adult and vice-versa. Has anyone had experience with effective techniques with Google to determine if a keyword is adult in nature or not? I have a few ideas I am experimenting with, unfortunately they require using a TargetingIdeaService lookup for each keyword which I'm not a fan of.

Thank you.

[Shwetha Vastrad (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Charles,

I'm afraid TargetingIdeaService is the one to use to get keyword statistics. But there isn't an option in the service to determine if a keyword can be classified as adult or non-adult. You can use the IncludeAdultContentSearchParameter to specify whether adult content should be returned. The Keyword Planner has this options as well. 

Regards,

Shwetha, AdWords API Team.

[Charles Michael]

That was the plan, I was thinking of running a search with and a search without the adult flag and based on the volume of suggestions, conclude whether the keyword is adult. Unfortunately this is a very costly algorithm, requiring 2 lookups per keyword. At 100K+ keywords, that's a lot of requests that it would probably take 2+ weeks to gather all the results. 

[Shwetha Vastrad (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Charles, 

I'm afraid there is no other service in AdWords API to perform this function. A maximum of 200 seed keywords can be included per keyword idea request. This would mean a total of 1000 requests in this scenario. 

I hope this helps. 

[Charles Michael]

I don't think bundling 200 seed keywords together would help as it wouldn't be conclusive which keyword suggestion is the result of which seed keyword. I'm afraid it would be necessary to do 1 keyword at a time in order to get conclusive results. 

[Nadine Sundquist (AdWords API Team)]

Hello Charles,

Shwetha passed this on to me to see if I could come up with a more efficient way of doing this. Unfortunately, I can't think of a better way. If I come up with a more efficient way, I'll make sure to post back.

Regards,

Nadine, AdWords API Team

[Charles Michael]

The best methodology I came up with was to do API requests, one keyword at a time with and without the adult filter in place and then comparing the results. It's not ideal, but it does work, just very slowly.