You know how most clubs or bars have a bouncer out front to ensure its patrons are ‘on the level’—they are who they say they are—all while ensuring the riff-raff remain out, or are kicked out if needed?
They play an integral role in ensuring things run as they should, maintaining the integrity of the establishment while ensuring its visitors are receiving what they want: an enjoyable experience that they expect when arriving at the club.
‘Bounce’ Your Negative Keywords
Did you know that there is a built-in function in the Google Adwords interface that acts as a kind of ‘cyber bouncer,’ to protect the integrity of your keywords and ads—ensuring a ‘good time’ for searchers—all while keeping Quality Scores high and unwanted traffic out?
Unfortunately for many online marketers, it’s all too often forgotten… a rare tool gathering dust in your ‘Keywords’ tab that is sure to save you thousands in unnecessary pay-per-click spend each year.
What is this tool? Well, it’s known as ‘Negative Keywords.’ Before you begin thinking that this is where you place sad, depressed, or angry keywords relating to your product or service, realize that it’s with this tool that you can literally eliminate any keyword phrase you like from triggering one of your ads. It’s true!
Negative keywords are the ‘gatekeeper’ to ensuring that particular search queries (words OR entire phrases) are ineligible to trigger one of your ads when a searcher’s search query contains that word, or phrase.
How Does It Work?
How does this work in practice? Well, say you own an e-commerce site selling shoes. If you don’t sell any shoes with the color purple in them, use ‘purple’ or any shoe phrase containing the word ‘purple’ as a negative keyword.
This way, when anyone types in the following phrases, for instance, your ad will not show for any of them, whereas it would have qualified in the ad auction before using the negative keywords:
- “Buy purple shoes”
- “Shoes that have purple in them”
- “Buy popular purple shoes online”
A theoretical example, yes, but there are negative keywords that make sense across any industry. Take for instance: ‘free’ ‘jobs’ and ‘cheap.’
If you use these 3 keywords as negative keywords in your account, you will ensure you’ll never have to pay for clicks on your ad from people that are searching for:
- Advertising jobs in Vancouver
- Free plumbing help in New York
- Cheap guitar lessons
Search queries like the above 3 are completely detrimental to your business (unless you’re in the business of providing free work, cheap work, or are purposely advertising on Google to hire employees). For the vast majority of us, this is not the case. And rest assured, while looking at your keyword details report, you’ll find some.
Here’s how to find the actual keyword queries searchers used to find your ad:
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Be under the ‘Keywords’ tab in the Adwords interface
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Look under the ‘Details’ tab
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Select ‘All’ or ‘Selected’ in the ‘SEARCH TERMS’ section
Once there, you’ll see queries like the 3 aforementioned ones lurking about. A complete waste of your advertising dollars if you don’t use negative keywords!
Be Cautious Though…
Negative keywords are easy to use, and real intuitive. But be careful! If you include full phrases as a negative keyword, simply because 1 of the words isn’t appropriate for your business, ensure you use [EXACT] or “phrase” match for these terms.
Going back to the purple shoes example, if you see that one of the search queries that triggered your ad was “buy purple shoes online ”, and you include that exact term (without quotations or square brackets—ie. it’s just broad match), it is very possible that ANY future search query that even contains the word “buy” or “shoes” could then be barred from triggering your ad… a definite ‘no-no’ when you’re trying to increase sales of your shoe inventory!
In this case, it would be best to either “phrase match” the term, so that the exact word-string (regardless of what comes before or after it) can’t trigger your ad, or [exact match] the term, so that that term word-for-word cannot ever trigger an ad. This would equate to “buy purple shoes online” and [buy purple shoes online], respectively.
That being said, your safest bet in this and similar cases is simply to use the word purple (broad match) as a negative keyword.
How do you add negative keywords to your account? Well, there is a dropdown menu at the very bottom of your ‘Keywords’ tab page. Find it, and:
Click the ‘+’ symbol and you will see you can add negative keywords to Ad Groups and to entire Campaigns as well. What’s more, you can have an entire negative keywords Shared list, which you can create in the Adwords ‘Shared library’, accessible on the left hand side of your Adwords dashboard, right below the listing of your campaigns. By creating this Shared list, you can apply the same negative keywords to multiple campaigns, saving you tons of time and effort on otherwise unnecessary administration.
A Win-Win For Advertisers
Do you see now how useful it is to exclude certain keywords and/or phrases from triggering your ads, and avoiding potentially worthless clicks that you have to pay for? It’s for this reason that negative keywords were invented by Google. Simple, fast, and they’ll improve the overall quality of your Adwords accounts. Better quality traffic, better click-through rates, and better chances of conversion… a win, win, win.
Start using your own ‘cyber-bouncer’ today, and keep out all the riff-raff from your Adwords account! And oh yes… there’s no cover charge.
What successes have you had using negative keywords? Feel free to share your experiences along with any questions or comments below!
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