In my last post about getting started with Adwords, I talked about the 5 basic things you need to know when building your first campaign on Adwords. I also mentioned that I would post some more tips. While it’s been over a month, I believe that it’s never too late to dispense some good Adwords advice – especially if it can save you money.
And save you money is exactly what negative keywords can do.
First of all, if you’re new to advertising on Google, you may be wondering what negative keywords are. Well, negative keywords are best described using an example (let’s use the greeting cards example from the last post):
Let’s say you sell greeting cards on your website, and you’re advertising on the keyword “cards” (phrase-matched). By advertising on this keyword, you’re pretty much covering the gamut of greeting card types (birthday cards, get well cards, anniversary cards, Christmas cards, etc.). However, I would be willing to bet that you’re also getting (and paying for) quite a bit of traffic from keywords such as memory cards, business cards, baseball cards, video cards, and a host of other keywords where you really don’t want your ad to be. What’s worse is that by appearing on these untargeted keywords, you’re inadvertently lowering your quality score, which effects how much you pay and where your ad appears (basically, the lower your QS, the lower your position and the more you’ll pay). This is where you can use negative keywords to your advantage.
All you have to do is add negatives directly to your keyword list, like this:
-memory
-baseball
-business
-video
This will prevent your ad from being shown on those unwanted keywords.
So how do you find negative keywords to add to your account? Here are a few ways:
The easiest way to find negative keywords. This is what I used to find the negatives I used in the example above. I put in the keyword cards, unchecked “Use synonyms” (so I just got results containing cards), and ran the tool. If you sell greeting cards, you’ll see in the results all the keywords you don’t want to advertise on and will want to add to your negative list.
Search Query Performance Report
You can run this report at the campaign or ad group level, whichever works best for you. It will show you the keywords for which your ad is being served and getting clicks (which unfortunately means that if you find any unwanted keywords here, you’ve already spent money on them). If you already have negative keywords in your campaigns and/or ad groups, then it’s a good thing to run this report every now and then to make sure your negatives are working for you, and you’re not wasting money on unwanted terms.
Just searching
I managed campaigns on Yahoo, and their platform doesn’t have a negative keyword tool; so I ran searches their site with Search Assist turn on. This showed me terms that contained my keyword(s) and had been already searched on. I was able to pick out negative keywords from there.
You can also use Google organic search
results to find negatives, simply by looking for search results for your
keywords that are completely irrelevant.
Your own analytics
If you’re running Google Analytics or any other analytics package on your website, it will tell you the keywords that are driving traffic to your site. Run a weekly or monthly report and see if you can spot some negatives.
So, the overall takeaway here is negatives are positive. By implementing and continually expanding your negative keyword list, you’ll increase your CTR and Quality Score; but most importantly, you’ll save loads of moolah.

In the one month that I’ve been a freelance copywriter, my
biggest frustration has been losing projects
to other “writers” who’s proposals
were filled with really bad grammar, horrible spelling mistakes, and even
“text-speak” (you know, things like “ur”, “lol”, etc.); however, their proposed
cost was 10 times less than what I was proposing. Forget the years of experience I outlined,
the variety of samples I provided, the glowing feedback I presented, and the
triple-proofread proposal I submitted. What the buyer wanted was cheap and fast.
You may have noticed that I’ve been posting a lot more than
I have in past months. You may have also
noticed that I’ve starting pimping myself with “Hire Me” links (hey, what else
can I use my own blog for?!). 













