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:
Adwords Keyword Tool
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.
