Adsense Adwords Help

Google Adwords Basics Part Three - Negative Keywords

Exact matches are great, because you can zero in on exactly what people are looking for. However, if you're only using exact matches, you may be losing out on a lot of great keywords which you haven't thought of. As a very simplified example, we can use someone selling cars again. Say your keyword is "car" (minus the quotes), if you're bidding enough, your ad could trigger any search with the word "car" in it. You may think this is great, because now you're going to get your ad showing up more often, but this is not at all what you want.

If you're doing any sort of advertising that requires keyword research, and you don't know what wordtracker is, bookmark that page now. Wordtracker gives the most comprehensive collection of search engine data currently available.

Type "car" (without the quotes) into the keyword box and click search. Take a look at the list below, and let's say you're selling new cars. If you're selling new cars, what would be the point in your ad appearing for someone who searches for "used cars" or "car rentals"? There wouldn't be. Again, sure you might think that this is going to increase the number of impressions your ad gets, but you don't want a massive amount of useless impressions. If you're getting a ton of impressions and no one is clicking on your ad, your Click Through Rate (CTR) is going to go down. The worse your CTR, the poorer the quality of your ad, and hence with Google, the more you're going to have to pay for your keyword. Moreover, if someone searching for used cars does click on your ad for new cars, it's very unlikely they're going to buy a new car, and you're just wasting money on clicks.

As we can see from the WordTracker results, if you're advertising new cars, there are a lot of irrelevant keywords you don't want your ad to appear for. In Google AdWords, to prevent your ad from showing for certain keywords, you want to ad that keyword with a "-" sign in front of it, i.e. for this example you would ad –used, -rental, -insurance, -cool, and so on.

I realized the massive importance of negative keywords when I created an ad promoting an alternative to the Multi Level Marketing (MLM) company Ignite. I wanted my ad to appear for search terms relevant only to Ignite the company. As you can imagine however, there are lots of searches for the word "ignite" which do not have to do with this company. Type "ignite" (minus the brackets) into WordTracker. We get results for searches on whether oxygen ignites, how gunpowder ignites, people having trouble igniting their furnaces, Nike Ignite golf clubs, and so on. If I hadn't gone through this list and added all of the irrelevant keywords into my list (with – signs), I would have gotten a lot of unwanted impressions, which would have seriously lowered my CTR with Google.

That's the basic principle of negative keyword research. There won't be any harm in adding irrelevant terms to your Ad Groups, so do the proper research and improve your CTR.