Use Negative Keywords to Turn Search Marketing Results Positive

Setting negative keywords is an effective strategy for getting the maximum ROI out of your search pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. Practicing effective PPC management involves constant effort of expanding your portfolio of keywords while also refining the list of keywords you currently bid on.

By setting negative keywords in your PPC campaign, you will:

Improve click-through rate (CTR) - CTR refers to the percentage of the people who viewed your ad and clicked on it. Ensuring that your ads don’t run against unrelated search queries means that you expose your account to fewer uninterested impressions. Doing this will result in a greater percentage of people clicking on your ads.

Create more relevant ad groups - By scrubbing your lists of keywords that aren't related to your business, you improve the relevance of your ad groups. Having closely related ad groups allow you to create a single message that speaks to the entire group of keywords.

Reduce ad spend - By avoiding paying for wasted clicks, you save money. Additionally, by creating more relevant keyword groupings with higher AdWords CTRs, you help raise your Quality Score, which in turn lowers your costs.

Let’s take a closer look at what negative keywords are and how to create negative keyword lists that will save you money and improve your ad campaign performance.

What are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are a match types in PPC advertising offered by Google AdWords. There are a couple things you should note when it comes to negatives:

They act as ad filters - Setting a negative for a keyword means your ad will not show for that word.

Apply to expansive match types - Negatives are useful when applying phrase or broad match within Google AdWords. In these cases, your keywords are being matched to different variations of a query and not all will be logical for the keywords you're targeting, and not all of which will be relevant to your product offerings or services.

How to Set a Negative in Your AdWords Account

Let’s imagine you’re an online retailer and you sell pet supplies. In your Google AdWords campaign, you have ad groups and ads set up around keywords set to “phrase match,” such as:

“Dog houses”
“Insulated dog house”

Now, it’s unlikely you’ll sell many dog houses if your ads display for the query "pictures of dog houses." Setting the modifier "picture" as a negative in your ad group will stop your ad from appearing for that particular search phrase. To set a series of negative keywords for your ad group, follow these instructions:

1) Add only one negative per line
2) Precede each keyword with a dash

So the negative keywords field in your AdWords ad group campaign will look like this:

-picture
-pictures
-image
-images
-clipart

The preceding "-" indicates to the Google AdWords system that the keyword is to be treated as a negative. If any of the negative keywords appear in a search query, your ads will not be matched to them in the search results, saving you money on wasted clicks an improves your bottom line.