🔍 Overview
OTTO's AI-powered negative keyword suggestions help you eliminate wasted ad spend by identifying search terms that are unlikely to convert. However, these suggestions do not appear immediately after activation. OTTO needs to collect and analyse a minimum amount of campaign traffic data before it can generate reliable recommendations. This article explains what to expect and what to do if suggestions are not showing up.
⚙️ How OTTO Negative Keyword Suggestions Work
Once you activate the negative keyword recommendation feature, OTTO begins monitoring your connected Smart Ads campaigns. It analyses incoming search term data, evaluates click and conversion patterns, and uses that information to surface terms worth excluding. Because the AI relies on real performance data — not estimates — it cannot generate meaningful suggestions until enough traffic has flowed through your campaigns.
🗓️ Activation Timeline — What to Expect
After you activate the feature, there is a data-collection period before suggestions begin to appear. During this initial phase, no suggestions will show — this is normal and expected behaviour. Suggestions will start to surface once OTTO has gathered sufficient campaign data. If you have recently activated the feature and are not yet seeing suggestions, your account is most likely still within the normal warm-up window and no immediate action is required.
📊 Minimum Traffic Requirements
OTTO requires a baseline level of campaign activity before suggestions are generated. If your campaigns are new, paused, or running with very limited budgets, the necessary traffic volume may not yet have been reached. Key factors that affect whether suggestions appear include:
- Active campaigns: One or more campaigns must be in an active, running state — not paused or ended.
- Sufficient impressions and clicks: Your campaigns need to accumulate enough traffic data for OTTO's AI to identify patterns. Low-volume campaigns may experience a longer wait before suggestions appear.
- Search term data: Your campaigns must be receiving search term reports. Broad match or phrase match keywords tend to generate the most usable data for OTTO's analysis.
If your campaigns are seeing very low traffic, increasing your daily budget, broadening match types, or expanding your keyword set can help accumulate the data OTTO needs more quickly.
✅ What to Do If Suggestions Are Not Appearing
- Confirm that the negative keyword recommendation feature is activated within your OTTO settings.
- Check that at least one of your Smart Ads campaigns is currently active and running.
- Review your campaign traffic levels — low impressions or clicks will delay suggestions from appearing.
- If everything appears correctly configured and your campaigns have been active for some time with reasonable traffic, allow additional time for OTTO to accumulate enough data.
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.