By Dave Laney, Search Analyst
Are you paying for clicks that don’t perform well or are unrelated to your business? Focusing on negatives is not a great way to live your life, but it can be gold in the PPC (pay-per-click) marketing world. Negative keywords are one way to filter out unwanted impressions. Once you add them to your campaign and/or ad groups, your ads won’t appear for any searches that contain these terms. This helps you spend your advertising dollars more efficiently, increase your click-through rate and your quality score, reduce your average cost per click, and ultimately, improve your ROI.
Let’s say you sell red paperclips. You might notice that a significant amount of your paid search traffic is coming from searches like “blue paperclips.” You probably don’t want to pay for clicks from users looking for something you don’t carry. Time to add a negative keyword for “blue paperclips.” Now, your ads won’t show up on searches containing both terms. (It won’t prevent ads from showing up if either “blue” or “paperclips” is specified in your ad campaign or ad group.)
How to find your negative keywords? Google’s Search Query Report. Look at your campaign or ad group keywords and click the “See search terms” button. This shows you the terms Google is matching to your keywords. Now export your data to Excel®. Sort your spreadsheet by number of impressions, from high to low. Start looking for search terms that you don’t want associated with your campaigns. Make the list as small and effective as you can.
Using the example above, you wouldn’t need “blue paperclips” if you already had “blue” as a negative keyword. Be careful when adding broad category terms such as “paperclips”… if you’re too general, it can adversely affect your overall traffic.
Once you add negative keywords to your campaign, you should start to see positive results almost immediately. Who knew life could get so much better just by being more negative?
In addition to negative keywords, there are many other ways to optimize a PPC campaign: deleting keywords, deleting ads, using keyword insert, using more long-tail keywords and fewer general terms, bid adjustments, and different matching options (to name just a few). We’d be happy to help you optimize your campaign using some or all of these methods. Give us a call if you’d like to learn more.
