Can anyone tell me about negative keywords and how to choose and implement them in your campaign?
buckworks
6:44 am on Apr 27, 2011 (gmt 0)
First, welcome to Webmaster World! :)
Here's a few thoughts: negative keywords help you to be more selective about where your ads are shown. Adding a negative keyword to an ad group or a campaign will stop your ads from appearing on searches which mention that word.
If you only ever used exact match searches, you wouldn't need negative keywords. But if any of your campaigns use phrase match or broad match, negative keywords could save you a lot of wasted impressions and dud clicks.
There are two main situations where negative keywords will improve your targeting:
- the search is about your topic but something about it is not what your target user would be looking for - a completely different topic has some vocabulary overlap with searches you're trying to target
When you set up your campaigns, you'll likely be able to think of several negatives just from your own knowledge. Don't count on that being enough, though. Spend some time with a keyword research tool, not just to identify searches that you'd like to bid on, but also to keep an eye out for searches that seem off-target. Use the off-target searches to start building your negative keyword lists.
After your ads are running, examine your query reports every few days to look for more searches that should be blocked. Check your query reports frequently at first, and at least once a month as long as you have ads running.
Suppose you have a campaign to promote blue widgets, which are very famous around this forum! If you sell new widgets, but do not deal in any used widgets, then users who searched for things like "antique blue widgets", "used blue widgets", "vintage blue widgets" or "refurbished widgets" would not really be the right eyeballs for you to reach. So add the words "antique", "used", "vintage" and "refurbished" to your negative keyword list. Note that the single word is enough to block the unwanted search.
In some situations it can be worth creating separate campaigns with different mixtures of negative keywords. That can let you bid most aggressively on your best targeted searches and bid less on searches where the targeting is looser but you'd still like to be seen. For example, you don't rent widgets, but perhaps some of the people looking for widget rentals would consider buying a widget if they knew about your company. A second campaign which didn't block rental-related searches could give get your ad showing to those folks, but at different bid levels than your main campaign.
