PPC and All That Jazz...

Positive Effects From Negative Keywords

2009-08-31T12:50:00.000-07:00

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!

Who are the people in your neighborhood? Getting to know your competitors…

2009-06-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

Many times when I ask clients who their competitors are, they list off their top offline competitors—but most of them are not present in the PPC marketplace! Clients are somewhat surprised by which companies they are bidding against on the search engine result pages. This being said, what is the value of knowing who you are competing against?

You can learn a lot from the top competitors in your marketplace, whether you are just starting to build out your PPC campaign or have been running PPC for a long time. With the right tools you can see what keywords your competitors are targeting, approximately what they are spending, what positions their ads are in and what messaging they are using for specific keywords. All these things can help you expand your campaign and increase the performance as well.

Luckily there are several websites that are able to help you with this analysis and aggregate all the information in one place for you. There are a lot of free and paid tools available, which you can find by searching around; but I would recommend using KeywordSpy.com or SpyFu.com. Both offer free trials with limited results, which can give you some good insights, but it is well worth subscribing even if it is just for a month. These sites make it very easy to see who are your competitors and what they are doing with their PPC campaigns.

The first step is identifying your top competitors, which you can do by going to the keyword research site you prefer and typing in your website URL. A list of competitors who advertise on similar keywords will appear, however you should go to their site and ensure they are similar to your website and the products you sell. You can also see the amount of PPC keywords they are using in their campaign, so it’s good to look for competitors with a broader range of keywords than you are using so you can find areas in which to expand. However, you may find good learnings from competitors with the same size or smaller keyword portfolios, so it is always good to look at both. Also, you can find other competitors by using the keyword research site on your competitor’s domain as well.

Once you have identified your top competitors, you can start your analysis. You want to look through the keywords they are targeting and the value of those keywords to them. You can tell the value of a keyword by the bid position, keywords in top positions (i.e., first, second, third) are most likely their top converting keywords. While keywords in real low positions (i.e., ninth or lower) are poorer-performing keywords that probably don’t get many sales or have high cost per sales but still help funnel searchers looking for their products. Taking note of the bid position is important so you know which keywords are more risky and that you may need to keep a closer eye on.

Take a good look at which keywords they are targeting and if you see keywords that you are not targeting think about adding them. Most of the keyword research websites will give you the CPCs of the keywords and the competitiveness, giving you some insight into how much extra budget you will need for the new keywords. You can also use keyword tools to find other keyword recommendations based on the new keywords you found from you competitors.

Next, look at your competitor’s ads and see what messaging they are using for which keywords. This is valuable because they may have messaging you have never tested or that could allow you to differentiate you ads from your competitors. Often you will see a majority of PPC ads on a results page with the same ad title, because everyone is implementing keyword insertion for the ad title. So having a static ad title may work better, because your ad stands out on the page from the competition that all have the keyword the searcher typed in as their ad title. Your competitor’s ads can also show you if they have special promotions they are running or new seasonal products; you may have better deals and want to promote them to draw searchers to your website over your competitors’.

Its also good to click on your competitor’s ads and see which pages they are driving searchers to on their website. Do they have custom landing pages? Are they driving traffic to the home page, category pages, or product-specific pages? Then compare your findings to where you are driving searchers. You want to ensure you are creating a search experience as valuable as your competitors’ so searchers think of your website in the same regard as the other top competitors in your marketplace. Otherwise, searchers may not come back to your website, even though you have the products they are looking for because they weren’t brought directly to them when they searched, so they don’t think of you when they are ready to purchase.

Finally, you can see which keyword they are targeting organically as well: organic keywords are good because they should be the keywords your competitor thinks best represents their business and drives valuable traffic to their website. So, again, you may be able to get some keyword ideas for you PPC campaign from these keywords as well.

So as you can see, you can find a lot of valuable information from your competitors. Some have been running PPC a lot longer than you, and some may have just started; but either way, they can give you ideas you may have missed. You will also have a better sense of what they are spending on PPC and if you are truly competing against them or missing out on a big piece of the marketplace.

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2009-04-08T07:49:00.001-07:00

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