You’ve probably heard of keywords and understand their importance to Google AdWords campaigns. In fact, keywords are a core component of AdWords as keywords trigger your ads. Selecting the right keywords is essential to a successful campaign. What about negative keywords?

Getting your negative keyword strategy is crucially important too. To do that, you first need to understand what negative keywords are and how to use them. Even if you use a third-party provider of AdWords management services in Auckland, understanding negative keywords will be beneficial.

This brief guide to negative keywords will help.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are keywords that you want to prevent your ads from being shown on. There are many reasons for using them but one of the most important is to ensure you are not paying for clicks from people who are not interested in what you are advertising.

Using an example is the best way to explain this. An immigration advisor running a Google AdWords campaign may target the keyword “visa”. However, potential immigration clients will use that word in a range of different ways when searching online. So, the immigration advisor may choose to use a broad match setting on that keyword.

However, the company will not want their ads showing on searches such as “visa card” or “visa credit card deals”. A broad match setting makes this possible.

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Therefore, the immigration advisor can add these phrases to the list of negative keywords in their AdWords campaign.

This ensures its ads can display whenever people search for things like “residency visa” or “visa application” but stops its ads from displaying on anything related to a Visa credit card.

Guide to Using Negative Keywords

• The starting point is to make sure you use the negative keyword feature in AdWords. If you are not, start today.
• Block never needed keywords at campaign level. You can set negative keywords at either campaign or ad group level. For keywords you will never want your ads to display on, its quicker and more effective to do this at campaign level, not least because it will prevent you from forgetting to add them when you create a new ad group.
• Use negative keywords to optimise your campaigns by ensuring visitors to your website go to the best landing page. For example, an online retailer that sells jeans might normally want to target all jeans-related keywords except when there is a sale on. The sale might only apply to women’s jeans, for example. In this situation, the retailer could add “women’s jeans” to the negative keyword list of the general jeans ad group to ensure only the sale ad group (with the sale ad text and landing page) applies to searches using the keyword “women’s jeans”.
• Finally, regularly review the keywords that are triggering your ads, adding any that are not applicable to your negative keyword list.

Saving Money

In summary, negative keywords are all about saving money. Back to our original example about the immigration advisor, if someone looking for Visa card information accidentally clicks on their ad, they will have to pay. By adding “visa card” to their negative keyword list, their ads won’t show on those searches, saving them money on unwanted and irrelevant clicks.