There is nothing more frustrating than paying for clicks that won’t bring you any business. Regular Keywords help you direct qualified traffic towards your website, whereas negative keywords help you avoid getting unqualified traffic.
Negative keywords are an essential, yet overlooked, feature in AdWords. It’s one of the keyword match types but works differently than its regular counterparts.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind with regards to negative keywords:
- They Serve as an Ad Filter – Creating a negative keyword will ensure that your ad doesn’t show for that particular term.
- They Apply to Expansive Match Types – Negative keywords are useful when applying phrase or broad match as opposed to exact match which only matches your ad to an exact keyword phrase you specify. When using broader match types, your keywords are matched to multiple variations of a phrase, not all of which will be logical extensions of the phrase you’re targeting and not all of which will be pertinent to your business.
Use the Broad Match & Negative Keyword Combination
So why not just use exact match and show only for the specific keywords you want to target?
There are two core reasons you don’t want to show only for these narrowly defined phrases:
- It Limits Your Reach – While broad and phrase match will sometimes display your ad in response to unwelcome keyword variations, they also help your ad display against highly valuable permutations of your keyword—variations that you wouldn’t be able to anticipate. (About 20% of search queries have never been searched on before!) In fact, limiting yourself to exact match causes you to leave most of the traffic on the table, as it ignores the long tail.
- The Costs Are Higher – “Head” or broader terms have greater advertiser competition and typically cost you more per click than more specific variations.
How to Find Negative Keywords
- Keyword planner
- Reverse brainstorm
- Search terms report
- Category pages in Wikipedia
- Related services /products you do not mix up
- Any Negative Associations
- Search for other meaning and include
Keep in mind:
Negative keywords work differently for Display and Video campaigns than they do for search.
- Depending on the other keywords or targeting methods in your ad group, some pages where your ad appears may occasionally contain excluded terms.
- For Display and Video ads, a maximum of 5,000 negative keywords is considered.
- You can create up to 20 negative keyword lists in your account.
Don’t underestimate the power of negative keywords – try the feature out for yourself in Adwords!
For more Digital Marketing tips head to My Blog
