Positive Effects From Negative Keywords

Some of you may be asking yourselves what a negative keyword is, while others may be wondering how much they can really help your campaign.

Negative keywords help eliminate unrelated traffic to your keywords. An example would be if you are a model train company, you would have negative keywords like “female,” “agencies” and “pictures” to eliminate traffic from people searching for human models rather than model trains. The impact of these negative keywords depends on the traffic volumes in your vertical and the keywords you are targeting.

No-brainer, right? Yet I would say more than half of the search engine accounts I have logged into to evaluate do not have any negative keywords! Not only that, but a large number of the ones that do didn’t put a lot of thought into it. I don’t know why—people may be unaware of negative keywords, may not think they will have an impact, or are simply lazy—but, in any case, implementing negative keywords can make positive improvements on your campaigns. And it’s relatively easy to implement!

Negative keywords can show positive effects on your campaigns in the following ways:
• decrease unrelated traffic & cost per sales
• increase click-through rates & quality scores
• ensure that ads aren’t placed on risqué subjects
All of these considerations can make valuable improvements to your campaign and are well worth the time you will put in to implement them.

Negative keywords can be implemented at different levels (account, campaign, ad group), depending on the search engine. It is best to implement negative keywords at the ad-group level, because these keywords are very related and you can really drill down your negative keywords to be specific to that set of keywords. You will have negative keywords that touch every aspect of your business; you may want to implement them at the campaign or account level. Some clients never want to show on any competitor terms due to legal reasons, so it is good to add competitor terms at the account level to ensure broad match keywords in any ad group don’t show up on the competitor’s brand keywords.

The easiest way to find negative keywords is look at the theme of an ad group. If it is about “ski pants,” you can use a keyword tool to look up related keywords. Simply type “ski pants” or “ski” into your keyword tool and see what keywords are suggested. A free tool to use for this is Google’s keyword suggestion tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). The results will show you possible negative keywords like “ski resort,” “ski passes,” and “ski poles,” which you can add as negative keywords because they are unrelated but receive a lot of traffic. It is important to look at the traffic volumes of these other ski terms and choose the well-trafficked unrelated keywords.

Just knowing your business is very helpful in building out negative keywords as well. If you know a lot of people search for red ski pants and you only sell black ski pants, then “red” would be a good negative keyword for you. Also, if you are a picture website and you want to ensure your ads don’t show up on any adult content, you would want to add negative adult-content keywords.

Another way to find negative keywords is to run a search query report in your Google AdWords account. This report shows you what keyword the searcher actually typed into Google and which keywords it was tied to in your account through broad or phrase match. This allows you to pinpoint trouble keywords that may receive a lot of clicks but never any sales and are not actually in your account… but your ads are showing on because of their match type.

Implementing negative keywords is a relatively easy process, but can take some time depending on the amount of ad groups you have within your accounts. You don’t have to build out a thousand negative keywords for each ad group; focus instead on most trafficked ad groups where the impact will be greatest. Remember to look for the high-traffic non-related keywords using the tools above and any obvious negative keywords that come to mind. You can always add more negative keywords or remove ones you already implemented at any time.

So whether your looking to lower your cost by eliminating searchers looking for products you don’t carry, receive lower CPCs because you ads have higher click-through rates and better quality scores, or by ensuring that your ads aren’t listed in risqué results or on competitors’ brand terms, negative keywords are your answer. It is too easy an optimization not to use to your advantage!