Negative Keywords | Keyword Research | Adwords Management | PPC Management

So, you’ve set up your Adwords account, researched your keywords, built your ad groups and your ads are running.  You’re getting a lot of impressions and clicks, but you aren’t getting any conversions.  Are visitors finding your site using search terms that aren’t relevant?  How do you know, and what can you do about it?

As you already know, you can manage the keywords in your Adwords account by “keyword match type”.  I won’t go into the details here, but to read more about the Broad, Phrase, and Exact match types, you can read my previous post on the subject.

Often, using broad match keywords in your Adwords account can lead to irrelevant and wasteful clicks to your landing page.  If you’re in a particularly competitive market or a niche with expensive keyword bids, it can negatively affect your quality scores and waste your budget.

I’ll use an example to illustrate the point.   Let’s say that you are advertising for a company that builds Stamped Concrete Patios.  You find that a good prospect for you is someone who is looking for “Patio” on the internet, so you add the keyword “Patio” to your Adwords account using Broad Match and Phrase Match keyword types.  Now, if a prospect searches “Concrete Patio” they will see your ad.

The problem is, if the prospect searches for “Patio Furniture” they will also see your ad.  If they click on the ad, you’ll waste your budget paying for the click.  Even if they don’t click on your ad, you’ll have a lower Click-Through Rate (CTR) than you should.  You may be surprised at how much money you are wasting in this manner.

So, how do you find out if you have a problem?  Once you know there’s a problem, how do you solve it?  The answer lies in Negative Keywords.  Using Negative Keywords in your Adwords account, you can screen out any searches that contain specific words or phrases.  As a result, any search containing those words or phrases will NOT trigger your ad.

In the example above if you had the keyword “furniture” in your campaign as a negative keyword, then your ad would not be shown to someone searching on “Patio Furniture”.

Using a well-thought-out list of negative keywords can save you significant money, increase your CTR, and increase your quality score.  Think about the types of words that you don’t want to trigger your ads and add them in as Negative Keywords.  For many advertisers, simply adding Negative Keywords like “Free” or “Used” or “Cheap” can eliminate a lot of irrelevant clicks.

Steve Ulman

Mercury Leads, Inc.

http://www.mercuryleads.com

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.