How To Create a Negative Keywords List and Get Positive Results
In the hunt to maximize pay-per-click effectiveness one of the most effective but frequently used strategies is negative keywords.
What are Negative Key Words?
A negative keyword is a request to the search system to prevent Google Adwords (or Bing Search Ads) popping against a specific search containing those words. For example if your company is advertising purified water, you would want to add a negative key word for well purified water (-well purified water). Because you don’t provide “well purified water” services and you don’t want to incur the ad costs of bringing web traffic to your site looking for erroneous searches.
How do I Find Negative Key Word Lists?
Finding negative keywords is relatively simple. Access your Google Ad Words Keyword Tool and enter in a keyword phrase you have for your website. In the results section scan far right until you find match-type and select “Negative”. You will see a large string of negative key word results you can add to your campaigns.
What is a Good Negative Key Word Example?
If you a premium brand looking to market yourself properly you would want to add a list of keywords that would prevent bargain or discount shoppers from accessing your ads.
Examples of this would be:
- closeout
- blow out sale
- liquidation
- cheap
- bargain
- for sale
- overstock
- free
- discount
Preventing Irrelevant Traffic with Search Reporting
The goal of any search campaign is converting as many relevant clicks as possible. If you are still having difficulty in building a negative key word list, use Googles Search Query Performance Report. This simple tool will list all the keywords that are triggered by your ad. The majority of keywords are going to be ones you’ve bid on, occasionally you will find some keywords that don’t fit or should be omitted into your negative key word list.
The use of negative keywords on Google AdWords campaigns limits the ads click-through rate to only the most targeted ones.