Whether you are already using AdWords, or are planning to use it to promote your business’ products or services in the future, there are many functions that need to be followed within the AdWords Campaign tool manager in order to help improve your chances of success.
Your ultimate goal when advertising with AdWords is to ensure that you are getting the cheapest cost per click, as well as getting the highest conversion rate possible. While there are many elements required to achieve this, one of the most important steps is developing your own “ultimate negative keyword list.”
For me, whenever I take over a business’ PPC campaign, the VERY first thing I do is seek out every potential negative keywords that needs to be excluded—and every time I do this, my clients always see an immediate increase in their conversion rate, quality score, as well as a lower CPC.
By adding irrelevant search terms into the negative keyword list, you will be able to:
- Increase the likelihood of the searcher clicking on your advertisement, as well as increasing the chance of them converting into paying customers—thereby instantly increasing your Return on Investment (ROI).
- Increase your Google Quality Score, which allows you to have a higher Google ranking placement, receive more impressions, and receive a lower cost-per-click (CPC).
While it is important to continuously focus on increasing your conversion rate, adding negative keywords will end up lowering the number of impressions (the number of times your advertisement is displayed), which will ultimately decrease the number of visitors clicking on your advertisement. While relevancy may go up, this may not be the best consideration if the total profit after advertising on that keyword goes down.
To illustrate, consider the following formula:
Sales – expenses – AdWords spending = net profit (loss)
Obviously you want the net profit to be as high as possible, which means your business is receiving the largest amount of money possible. Therefore, while some keywords aren’t converting as high as others, they may end up lowering your net profit if you exclude them, which is OBVIOUSLY something you don’t want to consider. Therefore, so long as the net profit goes up, don’t exclude the keyword. However, if the keywords are resulting in a net loss, then you definitely want to add them into the negative keyword list. In order to determine if keywords are performing at the level need, you should consider having conversion tracking set up.
Exact Phase vs. Broad Phase
Whenever you use an exact keyword phrase within AdWords, Google will not attempt to use alternative keywords to display your advertisement. However, whenever you use broad keyword phrases, Google will use other related keywords to display your advertisement. There are two ways Google will determine other keywords that it will display your advertisement:
- Words are omitted or added during the search query—for example, if you add a broad keyword phrase of “Gold Men’s Watches,” other search queries that might bring up your advertisement include “cheap gold men’s watches” or just “gold watches”
- Synonyms—words that have similar meaning to your broad keywords may also bring up your advertisement. For example, the word “watch” may be replaced within a search query for the word “view” even though the word “watch” is relating to jewelry. However, Google may not know the difference. Because of this, you need to be careful in understanding what synonyms could bring up your advertisement so you can add them in as negative keywords.
Tools to use to help find Keywords that are Not Relevant
There are a few tools you can use to help determine which keywords should excluded, which includes:
- Google’s Search Term Report—to learn more about how to use this to help find negative keywords, please watch Google AdWords video entitled: How to find and run a Search Terms report. You can also refer to learning about Google’s Search Term Report help Section. Using the search term can help refine your negative keyword list after you have an AdWords Campaign go live by seeing which search queries are bringing up your advertisement.
- Google’s Keyword Planner—while you usually use the Keyword planner whenever you initially start up a new campaign, this is a great tool to still consider if you already have a live campaign running. To learn more how to use the keyword planner, please refer Google’s help section
- Use a Thesaurus – Another great way to search for low-converting keywords to add to the negative keyword list is to look up your broad keywords inside a thesaurus. If you find words that are synonyms and are not relevant towards your keywords, then you should add them into your negative keyword list.
Look at Universal Negative Keyword Lists
There are also many keywords that can be excluded for nearly any type of campaign. For instance, you probably don’t want the word “free” or “cheap” to be included in a search term, as they will probably convert at a lot lower level. There are a TON of negative keyword lists that you can search out by simply searching “AdWords negative keyword list” within Google. Once you find a list you deem relevant, make sure to go through the entire list of words so you can determine if that specific keyword should be added into the negative keyword list.
