Your favourite Adwords Stop Words

Sharing in the spirit of the season!

[chiyo]

Ive just spent some time seeing how we can get better ROI from Adwords. Our commercial site offers quite targeted and relatively expensive business services that are characterised by just a dozen or so sales from online prospects a year, but every time it is a high cost service. Our keywords are quote expensive.. around 50c a click compared to much less for overture once we add more qualifying words (Adwords tends to not get less expensive the more qualified you make the keywords), so we need to make very sure that we are not getting nonsense clicks.

And to do this without signing up for Adwords university!

Out of all the things im learning on how to get Adwords closer to our overture ROI, i found how useful the negative stop words are (e.g. -keyword)

OK here are a few i am trying and maybe we can share notes.. All designed to make sure that those who click are qualified leads. We are fairly well placed in G! proper and get many general clicks from them for our free articles etc, but wanted Adwords to be strictly ROI driven. We are not amused by paying people to click to get our free articles or for people looking for free info, but are very happy for them to find us through the normal index without having to pay 50c every time!

We cant go with [,,] or "...." most of the time as that results in very few hits in our area, so most of our keywords are of the KW1 KW2 KW3 type

Of course they would differ according to each site, but some are general

-free
-babes
-information
-info
-news
-links
-university
-articles
-reports (only if you are not selling reports!)
-comparisons
-comparison
-cheap
-costs
-prices
-pricing

(the last 2 are probably farily unqiue to us as we dont compete on price and are not the cheapest of our competitors, offering higher quality instead, so assume that if sombody was mainly interested in price they will not convert)

I'm sure there are heaps more

[buckworks]

Here's a few I block for ... I find it worthwhile to block for both singular and plural of many words:

sample
samples
picture
pictures
photo
photos
images
image
clip art
clipart
lawsuit
lawsuits
danger
dangers
instructions
freebie
freebies
pix
graphic
graphics

[chiyo]

Thx buckworks.. very useful!

Heres a few more from me..

job
jobs
vacancies
vacant
situations vacant

(We get a dozen unsolicted job applications a day for a company with 5 full time employees who are not recruiting!)

[Robert Scott]

And to expand on buckworks list...
gif
jpg
jpeg
pic
pics
trial
gratis

The best thing to do is simply check your server stats each week to see how people found your site. If there are any keywords you don't like just add them to the negative list.

After a year or so you have most possibilities covered.