The Power of Negative Keywords in Your AdWords Campaign

If you’re new to AdWords campaign management, you might not be too familiar with negative keywords yet. As you become more comfortable with your campaigns and your ads begin to gain impressions, San Diego AdWords managers recommend taking your marketing efforts up a notch with negative keywords.

Why Do I Need Negative Keywords and What Will They Do For Me?

One of the primary keys to success in an AdWords campaign is to find the proper search keywords. You want to make sure that you’re reaching your intended audience, but spending part of your advertising budget on people not in your target market can wreak havoc on both your funds and campaign.

That’s where negative keywords come into play. Negative keywords are a way to keep AdWords from displaying your ad to audiences you know aren’t going to be interested, boosting your overall search engine marketing efforts. Like your regular keywords, they are also in list form.

How Do I Find Them?

Identifying potential negative keywords may seem impossible because the AdWords Keyword Planner was designed to enable you to discover keywords to bid on, not to find terms to exclude. But there is a relatively simple and straightforward approach you can use to get ideas for negative keywords.

Within the tool, when you search on a specific term (like “bookstore”), the tool will present a list of related keyword searches. It also includes information for each about search volume and competition.

If there are terms in this list that don’t apply specifically to your business (like “free” and “online”), they are candidates for your negative keyword list.

That Made Sense. What More Can I Do?

You can also identify underperforming terms in your campaign using the Search Terms Report. It shows the actual search terms people typed into Google that triggered your AdWords ads.

Sort by the highest number of impressions. This will tell you which terms did well enough to be seen by potential customers. Of those, which of them had higher click-through and conversion rates? These you want to keep. However, you might want to consider adding terms to your negative keyword list if they are have good click-through rates (you’re paying for these) and bad conversion rates (lost ad budget).

These are a couple of relatively simple steps you can take to significantly improve your AdWords campaign. If you could use a little help getting your campaigns up and running, reach out to Saba, Inc. We are a full-service online marketing company in San Diego, offering PPC, SEO, social media management, and web development and design. Give us a call today at (858) 277-1717 for more information!