Using "negative" Keywords

[fishorfamine]

Negative keywords are important in any campaign to improve click through rate. I must say first that there is a common misconception that improving click through rate on broad and phrase match will improve quality score. The truth is, only exact match CTR will improve quality score. The reason to improve CTR on broad and phrase match is to improve on your bottom line or cost per aquisition (CPA).

You'll want to mine your logs (Google Analytics for example) for what phrases are working and what are not. Take the words in the phrases that are not working for you and put them on your negative keyword list. Remember, that you have to have all of the words in a phrase for AdWords to filter that phrase out. Somtimes you want to use negative phrase match or negative exact match in your campaigns. Say there is a title to a book or song or something that is not related to your website, you will want to put that title as a negative phrase match. Another example would be if you are doing well on a keyword like say "security guard uniforms" and Google starts showing the ad under just "security guard" you can use a negative exact match like this -[security guard].

You'll want to use negative keywords in three ways:

Filter for Ambiguity - The keyword has more than one definition like bottle caps vs. baseball caps

Filter for Relevency - It's the right definition, but not relevant to my specific business.

Filter for Profit - Some keywords and phrase just are not cost effective and should be filtered out.

All in all you should create a pretty healthy negative keyword list by mining your data files.

[DavidMort]

Wow, that information surprised me a lot I should say.Interesting view on the issue, thanks for the interesting post.look forward to more info like this

[fishorfamine]

Thank you. I have two more posts and will be putting up more.

[Moore123]

I have never heard about negative keywords. The information in the post is interesting and informative but what is your own experience (or other people here) with negative keywords?

[JockPurtle]

Negative keywords are a must.

When you are running your campaign on broad match (note only do this once you are established in the market) you should never stop building your negative keyword list.

Note on that. In a perfect world you would have one keyword per adgroup on exact match.

I run a campaign on board match for a client and I have over 450 words on my negative keyword list.

[fishorfamine]

My experience has been that the number of impressions goes way down and the quality of traffic goes up. I don't get wasted clicks from curiosity seekers. My cost per conversion also goes down which is good for the pocket book.

[gomziwms45]

thanks for sharing such a great piece of information. I agree with you and I think you are correct as far as advertising is concerned. Negative Keywords are equally important as any other aspect of advertising.

[Nutty]

Yeah you must think about negative keywords when running an adwords campaign, we have a lot of negative keywords in our campaigns so that we don´t waste money coming up for words that will not bring us leads/sales

[therawdata]

I guess it depends on what you're selling, too. Sometimes you need curiosity to spark new business