Vipul’s blog

Google AdWords provides a very important tool in the form of Negative Keywords list to safeguard your marketing campaign from any unwanted impression and subsequent click. It allows you to define negative keywords both at campaign level as well as adgroup level and your ad will not be shown if any of the keywords in your negative keyword list appears in user query. Thus saving an advertiser from any unwanted visit and making it’s ad more relevant to user search.

It becomes more important if any of the keywords in the AdWords campaign are broad or phrase-matched. Having a proper negative keyword list results in following positives:

1. Your ad will not be shown for user searches that are not relevant. This results in your ad being shown for more relevant searches hence fewer click-throughs that do not convert to sales.
2. The overall CTR (click-through rate) will be higher because there will be fewer instances of user viewing the ad but not clicking as your ad is now more relevant to user search. The higher CTR will cause the ad to get a higher position without requiring a higher CPC (cost per click). Hence lesser CPC and increased ROI on your Google AdWords marketing campaign.

Let’s look at an example to make things more clear. Suppose a lead generation company in education space generates leads for students looking at options to study in UK. This education company’s Google AdWords campaign has an ad group with following broad-matched keywords:

• study uk
• uk study

This company uses couple of keyword generation tools to generate more keywords that are searched and contain the phrase uk study but may not be related to study in uk. For example, using the Google Keyword Tool yields following results for the keyword uk study:

• uk study information
• uk study visa
• uk study scholarships
• uk study loan

It’s unlikely to benefit the education services company that’s generating leads for students looking for ’study in uk’ options to display ad for user query “uk study loan” or “uk study visa”. Adding “visa”, “loan” to the AdWords campaign or adding “-visa”, “-loan” to the AdGroup will prevent the ad from being displayed for these user searches.

Include both the singular and plural forms of negative keywords as people often search using both. Adding the negative keywords should not be considered as one time activity rather list of negative keywords should evolve. Start with a list derived from a handful of keyword tools but add to the list over time. Web server log files are an ideal source for discovering new negative keywords. Gradually build up your list of negative keywords to avoid receiving traffic that will not convert.