Importance Of Negative Keywords

Let’s say you have set up your Adwords PPC campaign, collecting long lists of keywords to attract customers, have placed those keywords in Ad Groups, and put your ads together. Finally, the exciting moment arrives when your campaign goes live and you begin to wonder why you are getting lots of clicks and for some reason your sales conversion rate is low.
 
You begin to sit back watching the traffic horde arrive at your website, as expected, but they are not buying as much as you hoped.

Why?

There can be many reasons why this occurs, however, one reason that is often overlooked by new and even intermediate marketers (those with some knowledge and experience) is the construction of a good negative keyword list.

Negative keywords are similar to normal keywords that are used in campaigns to target desired markets, except that instead of attracting visitors to your ads and landing pages, negative keywords will keep them away. The use of negative keywords will stop your ads from being shown when used in a search query string.

This feature of negative keywords makes them an essential component to any successful keyword construction formula. Reaching highly sort after targeted traffic requires that you filter out as many unwanted impressions as you can. Keeping away the riff-raff will reduce your cost per click as you watch your sales sore and return on investment sky-rocket.

To locate which negative keywords you should use in your keyword list is not a difficult task, if performed correctly. When constructing your positive keyword list simply keep an eye open for terms that don’t apply to your product. It’s as easy as that. This is where I believe keyword finding tools are useful and come into their own.

These tools have a tendency to spit out as many irrelevant terms as they do relevant one. If you believe they don’t apply to your product or service put them in your temporary negative Keyword List.  

Also, try using your industry or market knowledge and experience of your product to add to the list. You know better than anyone else what terms are applicable and directly related to your product or service and which terms are not. You know what your product can and cannot do, so keep it real and only use keywords that are factual for your product. This will go a long way to warding off unnecessary impressions.

When you are at the point of adding your final negative keyword list to your campaign the process is no different from adding any other keyword except that you add a negative sign (-) in front of the negative keyword. Negative keywords can be added at the Ad Group level i.e. they will only apply to a particular Ad Group, or they can be set at the campaign level where they will apply to all Ad Groups within your campaign.

If you are selling a product or service the first negative keyword you will want to apply to your campaign will be the negative term -free. There are many people looking for free items and you need to prevent your ads showing for this type of person. This is very important if you rely on broad match keywords and phrase match keywords. You must always be on the lookout for ways to reduce your costs and one of the best ways to start is to get rid of freebie hunters.

This is where tracking keywords results becomes very useful as you can observe how many people are coming to you by using the term “free”. This type of  user enquiry does not convert, if it does it will be as rare as hens teeth. Therefore, the positives for using “free” as a negative keyword, such as restricting the showing of your broad match ads to insincere buyers, far out weight any negative effects, such as loosing a rare conversion.

Following you will find a few more keywords that will cut out the freebie hunters. Can you think of any others, also use misspellings of the words:

free
“free sample”
freebie
“free download”
gratis
no cost
costless
complimentary
trial
“free trial”

Keep in mind to use matching options where appropriate. For example, the negative keyword “-free trial” will stop your ad copy from being shown in search enquiries that contain the terms “free” and “trial”. However, it will not stop your ad copy being shown for variations of these two terms. You must also note that it will not stop your ad copy being shown in search results comprising of just one of the terms. For example, a search enquiry containing “30 day trial” or “free sample” (both containing one of the -negative keywords in a key phrase) can still result in impressions. Whereas, “free 30 day trial”, would not show your ad.

Another point to note is that if you are offering a free item in your campaign you will have to use free as a positive keyword else you will shot yourself in the foot and loose prospects. You need to consider your goals within your market.

On this same vein other keywords such as cheap, inexpensive, bargain, low cost need to be handle in a different way. These words can be very powerful if they are used in the right context. For example, if the product you sell is high priced compared to your competition there would be no point in using these terms as anyone looking for something discounted would immediately see you are not cheap.

On the other hand if your product offers a feature that your competitors don’t supply then your price would be inexpensive because you are offering extra value. But keep in mind if you are offering an up market product don’t even think of using these keywords just to pull in traffic as you don’t want your product/service to be associated with the idea of being cheap or a bargain basement line. You will only end up pulling down the good name of your product.

Now, if your product is well priced and highly competitive in your market then you must definitely use the terms bargain, cheap, discount etc. People who search using these terms are shrewd buyers and you will have great success.

However, think twice if you are not competitive within your market. It may be better for you to use the terms in their negative context to ward away unwanted clicks.

So remember, that as Cost Per Clicks rise and Quality Score favours a well constructed campaign, you must keep a diligent eye on your click through rate (CTR) now more than ever. Matching options should be used carefully, especially broad match as they enable your search terms to be associated with a multitude of things, many you may not even be aware of. You must disable as many of those terms as possible to control your costs. So take the time to build a comprehensive negative keywords list.

You will come across marketers that have a deep belief that you should only use exact matching, but for the majority of marketers that will only become profitable in a campaign when they have tight control over keyword use from long term tracking.

So, if possible always use negative keywords to keep costs down. If you have two thousand keywords in a campaign and even if a large percentage are exact match keywords you should still be in the habit of using negative matching. It may not be absolutely necessary, but create good habits and always use negative keywords. This will especially apply when advertising on the content networks to better target your visitors.

Earlier, it was mentioned briefly how to find negative keywords so here are a few more idea’s that may assist: 

Use Google’s negative keyword finder tool. It can be found at: Free Keyword Finder Tool.

As it may not be clear to some I will describe how to use the tool for locating negative keywords. Input your “positive” keyword, make sure you tick the “synonyms” checkbox (I am often surprised at what terms Google believes are related search terms). Now click on “Get Keyword Ideas”. Once the results show up go through the list manually and pull out those words you believe are negative keywords, then click on the small arrow to the right of the “Approx Avg Search Volume” column in the box below “Match Type”. The results will reveal what it believes are negatives to the positive keyword you typed in.

Another way to locate negative keywords is to ensure you run a search in Google for the positive keyword you are interested in then look through the top 100 results to sieve out the ads and keywords being used in the search result ads that don’t belong to your search query. This always yields some negative keywords.

Take this idea a step further by visiting the unrelated sites to find other negatives you could use. Remember it does not cost you anything when injecting negative keywords into your campaign, so long as they are negative for your product.

For more detailed information on learning how to organize your Keywords, ad groups and locate negative keywords to ward-off unnecessary impressions and clicks, reduce your costs, and increase the volume of highly targeted traffic to your website, to make money marketing the way professionals do visit the Adwords work at home guide home page.

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Paul Goodwyn is a well know marketing professional and author of the best selling e-Book for optimizing Adwords, “The Adwords Navigator Manual”.
Paul is the Founder CEO of Adwords Navigator PPC Marketing, offering Google Adwords PPC advertising, management, account set up, affiliate training, professional marketing consultancy services, keyword/ad copy research and analysis strategies.
For more information please go to Adwords Navigator Home Page OR Adwords Navigator Blog