Your Guide To Negative Keywords!

Determining your most profitable keywords and creating relevant ad groups, ads, and landing pages based on those keywords is crucial to succeeding in paid search. Doing so allows you to seek out potential customers who are checking out offerings similar to yours. But unless you’ve got money to burn, it’s equally important to spot and eliminate keywords—and thus, searchers—who aren’t trying to find the products or services you provide.

Sadly, most Google Ads (formerly referred to as Google AdWords) and Bing campaigns cost much more than they have to because advertisers find themselves paying for clicks that never deliver a return on their often-substantial investment. For some, this will be frustrating enough to avoid advertising on search networks entirely.

So how does one avoid the pitfall of wasted spend?

You use negative keywords, of course!

After reading what follows, you’ll understand:

• Exactly what negative keywords are

• How they will improve the worth and relevance of your paid search marketing efforts

• The value of negative keyword lists

• How to find and add negative keywords at scale

Let’s get to it.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are a way of preventing your ad from showing to people that look for or browse content associated with those words.

Effective paid search management means consistently expanding the keywords you’re bidding on while simultaneously refining the keywords you’re already bidding on to maximize relevance and, as a result, ROI. That second part doesn’t just mean pausing poor-performers: it means eliminating some search queries entirely.

Negative keywords offer you the chance to do just that, ensuring that your ads only reach the most effective potential audience.

Just like with the keywords you really bid on, negative keywords are often assigned at the account, campaign, or ad group level and are available in multiple flavors: broad, phrase, and exact. Understanding how these match types work is imperative if you wish to maximize the worth of negative keywords in your Google Ads and Bing ad accounts.

Negative keyword match types

When using a negative broad match, your keywords are matched to multiple variations of a phrase, not all of which can be logical extensions of the phrase you’re targeting, and not all of which will be pertinent to your business.

In the example below, the negative broad match keyword trainers would negate queries that show the whole negative keyword, even in cases where the words aren’t within the same order.

This doesn't, however, mean that you simply will eliminate all relevant search queries; your ads will still be eligible to enter an auction if they contain some (but not all) of the terms present in your negative keyword. this is often illustrated within the example above, where an advertisement would still be served for search queries like “blue tennis shoes” and “google running gear.”

Negative phrase match keywords are slightly less restrictive.

Using an equivalent example as before, your ads would be eligible to point out for any search query that doesn’t contain the phrase “running shoes.” That’s because this iteration only negates search queries that contain the exact phrase you specify. a search query could have more words than your negative phrase match keyword, but if it contains the precise phrase you’ve specified, your budget is safe.

Finally, negative exact match keywords exist solely for you to eliminate specific search queries. If you add negative exact match keywords to your Google Ads account, your ads won’t show only when a searcher enters exactly what you’ve added to your account. No extra words. Nothing.

Note that things are a tad bit different on the Display Network and YouTube (TrueView campaigns); in these campaigns, all negative keywords are considered an exact match.

Regardless of which network you’re advertising on, you ought to remember that adding too many negative keywords can have an adverse impact on your ability to reach prospects; a carefully curated list, however, has the potential to save you plenty of cash.

More advantages to adding negative keywords

Improve Click-Through Rate (CTR) — Ensuring that your ads aren’t running against irrelevant queries means exposing your account to fewer uninterested impressions, meaning that the proportion of individuals who click on your ad is going to be greater.

Create More Relevant Ad Groups — By removing keywords that aren’t associated with your business, you tighten the relevance of your ad groups. Small, closely related ad groups allow you to craft one message that speaks to the whole group of keywords.

Save Money (Again) — So nice it’s listed twice! By avoiding paying for useless clicks, you save tons of cash by removing searchers who aren’t a fit for your business. you'll also avoid bidding against yourself, cannibalizing impressions, and watering down your keyword-level data.

Raise Your Conversion Rate — Negative keywords will make sure that your ads don’t show for particular terms that you simply know won’t convert, just like the names of competitors or people who convey a complete lack of business intent.

How to Add Negative Keywords

So, you would like to implement broad and phrase match keywords in your account to capture more traffic, but you’re left with a burning question…

How do I combat irrelevant clicks and impressions and uncontrolled ad spend?

Discovering negative keywords has been a laborious process, involving sitting around and brainstorming (which only gets you so far) or poring through search query reports in Google Ads.

To do this, you have to navigate your way over to the “Keywords” tab within the Google Ads UI at the account, campaign, or ad group level:

The default interface here will allow you to look at the keywords you’re bidding on, but not the queries that triggered them. to ascertain this information, click “Search Terms” at the top of the UI:

Welcome to Queryland!

Here, you’ll notice columns that don’t exist on the keyword screen, including:

• Search Term: The query a searcher entered into Google (or said to a virtual assistant) that triggered a keyword you’re bidding on.

• Match Type: The degree to which a search query matched up with one among your keywords.

• Added/Excluded: Action you’ve taken with a search query (added it to your account or added it as a negative keyword)

…and the other columns you’d wish to pull into the interface to make informed keyword-related decisions.

Let’s take a glance at the way to add a negative keyword to your account.

Adding a negative keyword to your Google Ads account

Let’s say I actually don’t want my ads to serve for the search query AdWords extensions.

Checking the box to the left of the search query (as depicted above) will generate a blue option bar:

Since we would like to feature this query as a negative keyword, select “Add as negative keyword” (shocking, I know). From here, you’ll be prompted to decide on the extent at which the negative keyword should be assigned and therefore the match type you’d wish to use.

From here, simply hit save, and your negative keyword will go live!

Now, within the event you opt to assign your negative keyword to a negative keyword list (and then apply said list to multiple areas within your account), there are some additional processes to follow. Let’s take a glance at those.

Creating Lists of Negative Keywords

Let’s face it: a Google Ads account built solely on exact match keywords probably isn’t even effective if you’re Ford or BMW. As such, you would like to believe broad and phrase match keywords to ensure adequate search volume and uncover new opportunities. But there's, of course, a downside to this kind of fishing expedition: you’re probably competing for an equivalent impression across campaigns.

Let’s say you sell cat and dog clothes through your eCommerce website. Without negating the word cat (and all cat-adjacent queries) in your dog clothes campaigns, you’ll inevitably run into the difficulty of Google deciding to match a broad match cat keyword to a dog-related search query. The results will clearly be irrelevant to the searcher. If they don’t click it, your CTR is watered down over time; if they are doing, the resulting landing page will have nothing to do with the search intent.

This is called a lose-lose.

The only route to explicitly avoid this unfortunately wasteful snafu is to feature negative keywords.

Doing so as queries come is very inefficient so, instead, it is sensible to proactively create lists of search queries you don’t want your ads to point out for. within the scenario outlined above, the utilization of negative keyword lists would make sure that Google can’t serve a “dog clothes” ad to a “cat clothes” search query because the sole ads eligible to serve are in your dog clothes campaign.

Neat, huh?

This doesn’t just work for high-fashion pet wear.

Let’s say you wish to eliminate a keyword across your entire account because, say, you simply sell new cars and need to make sure your ad spend isn’t wasted on queries regarding used cars. Or you’re an agency with multiple clients who operate within one vertical, who will likely have negatives in common.

You, my friend, are in dire need of negative keyword lists, too.

To create a negative keyword list, click the tool icon at the top of the Google Ads UI, and choose “Negative keyword lists” from the “Shared Library” column.

From here, hit the blue sign and name your new list of negative keywords. Add the terms you’d wish to negate (ensuring match type accuracy) …

To add your new negative keyword list to existing campaigns, move to your campaign, skip to the keywords tab, then the negative keywords interface.

Here, just select “use negative keyword list” then select the suitable list, hit save, and you’re ready to rock! Add any ad poaching search queries that you may find directly to your negative keyword lists

Now sit back and relax getting Google to serve the proper ads for the right search queries. Of course, you'll push this same concept to the ad group level for even tighter control.

With that, here are some techniques you'll use to uncover costly negatives you’d otherwise miss with surface-level analysis: especially if you’re scaling your account.

Advanced (Negative) Search Query Mining

If you’re bidding on broad match keywords to maximize impression volume but ignoring your search queries, you’re wasting money.

I’m sorry to have to break it to you, but it’s the truth.

By not managing your negative keywords in tandem with new opportunities, you’ll inevitably overlook costly search queries that may be torpedoing your ability to convert valuable searchers into customers.

Earlier, we reviewed the method of adding negative keywords to your Google Ads account; now it’s time to work out which search queries actually need to be negated.

Keywords aren't search queries

Say it with me…

Keywords aren't search queries.

Keywords are assumptions. Search queries are actions.

They are what you think that your customer will search for when using a search engine; search queries are the truth.

Oftentimes one keyword can match with hundreds or maybe thousands of search queries.

This is fantastic for uncovering new, long-tail opportunities (hyper-relevant, low-volume keywords you must add to your account), but it also results in inevitable wasted spend. this is often why digging through what appear to be insurmountably long lists of search queries in an efficient manner is So. Darn. Important.

Identifying the proper negative keyword opportunities at scale

Typically, inexperienced or busy account managers lean towards a qualitative method for adding negative keywords.

What does that mean?

They alphabetize the list of search queries, reading line-by-line and asking themselves, “does this thing here have anything to do with my business?”

While this isn’t inherently bad—and will definitely assist you to remove cat-jacket queries from your dog sneaker ad group—it doesn’t make use of the wealth of quantitative data available (it’s also horribly inefficient at scale).

Whether or not a search query deserves to become a negative keyword (or be added to an inventory of negative keywords), maybe deduced by asking three questions:

• Does this search query have a below-average CTR?

• Does this search query have a below-average conversion rate?

• Does this search query have an above-average cost per conversion?

The reasons that these are the questions you would like to ask yourself should be self-evident.

If a search query features a below-average CTR, it means searchers who see the ad triggered aren’t clicking. If the query in question has nothing to do with your business, it should become a negative keyword. If it does relate to the products or services you sell, and it's volume, consider creating a replacement ad group for that search query, during which a more-relevant ad is included.

If a search query features a below-average conversion rate or an above-average CPA, it implies that after clicking on your ad searchers’ expectations aren’t being met. this might result from to the very fact that your landing page isn’t optimized for mobile or lacks adequate paths to conversions; it might be a result of poor alignment between intent and objective. Either way, queries that don’t convert oughtn’t to be triggering your ads.

To glean answers to those questions (and any others you might use to work out the relative value of a search query), you’ll have to master the use of filters.

To use a filter, navigate to the “Search Terms” interface (discussed towards the beginning of this here guide) and click on the tiny funnel. this will allow you to type the name of parameters you’d wish to filter by or select them from a picklist.

From here, make sure that you’ve enabled the columns you would like in order to look at the metrics you’re filtering by; to do so, click the three vertical bars.

Each filter will prompt you to determine parameters using greater than, less than, or equal to alongside an open field, like so.

Note that you simply can layer filters to seek out search queries that exist at the intersection of specific metrics.

For example, you would possibly want to seek out queries with exceptionally high CTRs and CPAs, people who clearly trigger your ads but do nothing but cost you money. Once identified, check the queries you’d prefer to add as negative keywords, select your match type, and stop wasting ad spend.

Going Negative

Why is this time-consuming process so valuable?

Effective negative keyword management keeps your keyword research clean and maximally relevant, so you’re better able to deliver a compelling, targeted message to the precise segment of searchers you most want to succeed in. And your budget will be spent on impressions and clicks that are highly likely to drive relevant traffic, qualified leads, and eventual sales.

Interested?

Designate has consistently increased conversion rates for its clients by engaging the most sophisticated metrics and tools to acquire, engage, and convert target audiences across domains. Get in touch to know how we can boost your ROIs

Boring? Yes. Time-consuming? Well, a bit. Necessary? Absolutely