Using Negative Keywords

Negative keyword matching is perhaps the most powerful of all Google Adwords features and is in itself an excellent reason for using paid marketing. It allows you to avoid serving ads to anyone who has included a particular trigger word in their search query, irrespective of whether the rest of the query is a good match.

Let's consider an example. Jane smith sells luxury handbags by mail from her online business based in Miami, Fl. You know the sort of thing: Prada, Fendi, Gucci are her most popular ranges. She has been going broke on Adwords paying for broad match phrases like “buy handbags online", but finding that many of her customers never complete a purchase. After investigating her web logs, she realizes that many searchers look for "Cheap handbags", "hang bags sale", and the like; exactly the wrong sort of searches for luxury handbag sales.

Jane switches to phrase-match terms and sets a negative keyword matching list that includes the following terms: free, budjet, cheap, discount, sale, "cut rate", "marked down", inexpensive, affordable, “low priced" reduced, factory.

Following this her number of Click-through falls by more than 60% but her number of sales stays exactly the same. This allows Jane to increase the range of terms she targets and to cid separately n exact-match terms like: luxury hand bags and more.
The best please to set negative keyword matching is at the campaign summary level, so return there. Click on the “Add link to bring up the "edit campaign negative keywords" dialogue. Add your own negative, matches one by one.

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Thanks for the post. That’s a really great tip you have there.

 

True, everyone should be on top of their negative matches if you're running broad match queries. For everyone who doesn't know, the best way to find these negative matches would be:

1) Run a search query report form the reporting centre

OR (the method I usually use)

2) Find your broad match term in your UI, check the box next to it, then at the top of the list one of the options will be See Search Terms, click selected and you'll see them all appear. From here you can easily add that search term as an exact match if it's performing well for you, or add it as a negative if it's not (much easier than using the spreadsheets in the reporting centre)

 

So many people using Google AdWords do not use negative keywords. I have helped reduce the window shopers by using the negative keywords.

An example of how to use negative keywords.

You have a hosting company called say "perfect hosting".

You advertise and use one of the most popular searched words related to hosting "free hosting".

If the company "perfect hosting" does not offer free hosting then people will search free hosting and the advert will appear.

Then people will click and see there is no free hosting and click off the site, and then goto another site that has free hosting.

Using the words "free hosting" has got the company adverts 10s of thousands impressions and loads of click costing say £1000 a month.

But actual customers - 0 from the the term "free hosting".

So if the advert was setup.

"perfect hosting", "uk hosting", "hosting"

and the negative keyword "free" was used anyone searching in google for "free hosting" will not see the advert.

Hence the impressions will be lower but so will the costs and the customers should start to come in.

I hope this makes sense!