What Are Negative Keywords?
Negative keywords are words or phrases that, if used in a search query, will ensure your ad is not displayed to that user. By adding negative keywords to an AdWords campaign, you are able to filter a lot of unwanted traffic. If done correctly, this can boost your click through rate, which in turn, improves your Quality Score. Higher rankings means lower cost per click which will raise your return on investment. In addition, showing your ads to more relevant browsers results in a higher conversion rate and a lower cost per acquisition.
In other words, you should be using negative keywords! However, you should be implementing and managing them correctly, of you could find yourself preventing potential customers from seeing your ads.
How Do I Tell Which Negative Keywords To Use?
A good example is a Mens Shoe Retailer. If you had an Adwords campaign running with the broad keyword “shoes” your ad will be shown to everyone who searches for shoes (even if you have the broad matched “mens shoes” your ads still may show to the list below):
- mens shoes
- ladies shoes
- kids shoes
- horse shoes
- cheap shoes
Anything containing the keyword “shoes” will show your ad, even though you only stock mens shoes.
You would add the following negatives:
- kids
- ladies
- horse
- cheap
Now you have ensured that your ads will only be visible to relevant searchers.
Why not just use exact matched keywords?
You still want to gain the mass traffic from simple searches, like “shoes” but filter out the traffic you know will not lead to a conversion. If you used exact match keywords for everything you might be limiting your ads too much. While broad and phrase match keywords can bring unwanted traffic and clicks that don’t lead to conversions, they also allow for search queries you have not yet thought of. For the most successful Adwords campaign a combination of both negative and positive broad, phrase and exact keywords need to be used.
How Do You Add Them?
Just like any other keyword, only in the “Negative Keywords” section, just below the main keywords table.
The Keyword Tool and Search Query Report are great starting points for finding negative keywords for your ad group, and the Google Adwords Help Centre has great guides on adding negative keywords.
It can be daunting at first, but you will get the hang of it. The most important thing is to constantly be checking your Adwords campaign for new negative keywords to include. Just like you would monitor what positive keywords are achieving results, you need to monitor which negative keywords are need to achieve your goal.
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