One of the most important tactic to successfully inheriting and optimizing an Ad Words account is to build a negative keyword list. Negative keywords are a pay-per-click advertising match type option offered by most of the major search engines and is a way of designating what kinds of searches can trigger your ads to appear.
How can a negative keyword list influence a PPC campaign?
I don’t know if when Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “Money often costs too much “was talking about Google AdWords but a lot of campaigns have their budget wasted by targeting the wrong audience. We know already how important is CTR and how much can influence the costs of a campaign. Broad match options allow your products and services to be found for search terms you may not even have thought existed before but that comes at a price.
Only some business have the time, energy and resources to build a negative keywords list despite the importance these play in maximising ROI and conversions. A common mistake is to wait until the end of the first months when reports are being rune or until they gather enough analytics. According to Word Stream half of the advertisers don’t add a single negative word in the first month.
Al these marketers are missing out on chances to maximize the effectiveness of their spend budgets, because negative keyword strategies often are left out of the big strategy picture. Having a comprehensive well-selected negative keyword list can significantly improve your CTR and also your conversion rate.
Why do we need negative keyword lists?
- Eliminate wasteful ads before it starts
- Increase productivity and conversions
While having a list is very important another important factor is to update the list weekly, monthly or after checking analytics and your own data. There are 2 important factors to consider.
- People click on everything including the off target ads, especially now that a lot of the traffic happens on mobile who have small screens and marketers are charged for any click.
- Even if most of the people are smart enough not to click on them the Quality score of that ad is affected by the low CTR.
If you don’t know where to start don’t worry, there are a couple of tools and methods to help you populate and update your keyword list to achieve the best results for your campaigns.
Use Owned Data
Analytics from your website are the best source of negative keywords. By sorting the keywords on the basis of bounce rate we can get keywords that are not converting. Google Analytics can be useful to identify long tail keywords but at the same time they are keywords which do not really help us, individually might not be so expensive but cumulatively they can increase the spend budget.
A monthly or week by week report is necessary to highlight them and to make sure your ads are not triggered by the wrong terms. A Search Query Report can help you identify and add new terms to your existing list to reduce spends.
Know your industry and organic use search
You must know your product, if not try to use your knowledge on the industry. If is the first time when dealing with the product or try to gather as many information as possible from the website, your customers or speak directly with producers. Did you find similar or spelled similar words to your product or service name? Also be aware that new products are being released every day. Do not chance anything and use organic searches and identify searches that don’t have anything common to yours keywords and add them to your list.
Thesaurus
No person, unless you are an English language Ninja would know all the derivations of a term. Run your main keyword trough Thesaurus. Find variations of your keyword and variations of variations. Ask your colleagues or family if they know any related services or products to your main term.
Especially for small companies a missed negative keyword can waste their budgets whiteout getting any leads of conversion. Do your research to not find negative keywords the expensive way, the hard way.
Existing negative keywords lists
One of the most used practice is to review existing list that other people have generated. You will find general lists (which include words like nude, sex, porn etc.), employment search negative keywords used by people who are searching for jobs (hire, employer, jobs etc.), education and research keywords used by people who are looking for courses, how to and many more.
- Engine Ready Negative Keywords
- 200+ Negative Keywords to Consider for B2B PPC
- 150+ Negative Keywords for Software Selling AdWords Campaigns
- Banned word lists from forums
You should also use geography lists if you are only targeting certain areas to make sure your ads are shown to the right audience.
There are a lot of other places where you can update your list like; IMDB’s title search for video titles and features Leo’s Lyrics for audio and songs and of course Wikipedia.
All these should be tailored for your audience and tested for best results. Google analytics and reporting should highlight new terms.
Free negative keywords tools
Keyword Planner is tool dedicated to help you find keywords to bid not to exclude, Google does not mind if a couple more euros are spend. You can still use this tool to get ideas and to find negative keyword for your campaign.
Soovle is one of the best tool designated to show suggestion from any number of search engines. Is very useful to find new trends and search terms.
Übersuggest is a free tool used to give you suggestion’s based on your keyword search. Is scrapes Google Suggest and other suggestion services to come up with new lists.
Free Negative Keyword Tool by Word Stream is a free negative keyword tool that will help you lower costs and improve Quality Score for more effective, relevant, and budget-friendly PPC campaigns.
You might think that this is time-consuming and why should you choose broad match? Is simple you want control how ads are displayed for each of your audiences search terms.
Now that we have good idea on how to build and update your list of negative keywords is time to show you how you can add them to your account and start saving money.
Watch this quick tutorial from AdWords.
There is allot to think about when searching for negative keywords. Is it worth it?
What are some of your favourite ways to find negative keywords, and what are some of the worst search queries you have seen?
Bibliography
Word Stream. 2015. Free Negative Keyword Tool. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.wordstream.com/negative-keywords. [Accessed 20 August 15].
Support Google. 2015. Adwords. [ONLINE] Available at:https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2453983?hl=en. [Accessed 20 August 15].
Word Stream. 2015. Blog. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/03/04/negative-keyword-list. [Accessed 20 August 15].
Support Google. 2015. AdWords Help. [ONLINE] Available at:https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2453972?hl=en. [Accessed 21 August 15].
PPC Hero. 2015. Blog. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.ppchero.com/inheriting-large-pay-per-click-accounts/quick-ways-expand-negative-keyword-list/. [Accessed 16 August 15].
Red Fly Marketing. 2015. Blog. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/how-to-build-a-negative-keyword-list/. [Accessed 20 August 15].
Kissmetrics. 2015. Using Negative Keywords. [ONLINE] Available at: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/using-negative-keywords/. [Accessed 24 August 15].
Komarketing. 2015. Blog. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.komarketingassociates.com/blog/200-plus-negative-keywords-to-consider-for-b2b-ppc/. [Accessed 24 August 15].
HubSpot. 2015. Blog. [ONLINE] Available at: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-write-blog-post-simple-formula-ht. [Accessed 18 August 15].
Word Stream. 2015. Blog. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/02/09/how-to-write-a-blog-post. [Accessed 18 August 15].
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