Back to Basics: The Forgotten Art of Negative Keywords

Everybody is always so concerned with what keywords do I pick to advertise on. The words you specifically do not advertise on are just as important.

When developing a keyword list, try to think of ways that your words could be related to other topics irrelevant to your business. Take the word coach... think about it for a minute. You have football coaches, baseball coaches, motor coaches, life coaches, Coach Handbags, Coach the TV show, and the list undoubtedly goes on. Well if the word coach is central to your ad campaign you better get to work on brainstorming negative keywords.

Once you've done your own brainstorming go online and do some actual searches. See anything that doesn't match your query? You can use this method to generate more negative keywords. If your Adwords campaign already has some data accumulated run a Search Query Report and see how your keywords are being matched. Another good place to look if you have an analytics package attached to your site is at your organic traffic. Like the Search Query Report, Analytics will show you actual searches that resulted in a visit. Do any of them look a little bit off?

Now that you have all these possible negative words you need to make some decisions. Are they going to be implemented at the Campaign or Ad Group level? And are they the right words? Make certain that a good negative word for one keyword won't kill the relevant traffic of another.

Once you're satisfied that you will be decreasing bad traffic without hurting the good stuff, pull the trigger. Let your changes simmer for a couple of days and then check out the impact. Are your CTR's up? Conversion rate improve? Or has your traffic fallen flat? Even if you're happy, keep experimenting. Adwords doesn't stop changing so you can't either. Whether the results are good or bad, make sure you know why your traffic changed so that you can either fix or replicate the action.

Focused Expansion, Controlling Expanded Search in Adwords

Personally I'm a fan of broad match and the ensuing expanded search feature in Google... now that I can track it. I can't say this enough ...I love the Search Query Report... it opens a lot of doors and shows you negatives you would have never thought of. Plus it has potential to save you money!

One of the reasons I like expanded searches is that no matter how hard you try, you will never be as creative/ridiculous as the general public. The way people structure their searches is really fascinating. The general populace's inability to spell is a little troubling too. But just because someone can't spell, or uses an awkward path to get to your site doesn't mean they don't have a credit card. As a search marketer you need to cater to everybody who could buy your advertised product.

Now the downside of expanded matching is that Google can get even more creative than the public. It's kind of scary that an algorithm is making leaps in logic to include you in queries that may be related to your objective. To give you a few examples of the mayhem that ensues: I searched 'buy a luxury bus' and some of the ads used the word coach, in position 6 was Coach.com the handbag maker. A word I use for a general contractor now has about 400 negative keywords to include 'Land Cruiser', 'foreskin', and 'hearing'. I've also seen a lot of celebrity name crossover, if you're not up to date on pop culture at least use derivatives of the word 'naked' as negative keywords (half of all celebrity searches seem to involve nudity, traffic I'm guessing you don't need). All these types of match drop click through rates and waste money.

Now that it is available, I can't stress enough the importance of running at least a monthly Search Query Report. This matched with the Adsense Placement Report are probably the two most useful features that Adwords has given us this year. Run the SQR report and sift through it by hand to extract all the most irrelevant searches. Then make a second pass looking for good words and phrases you don't have in your account that you should. Your first SQR report should be a PPC revelation, there's going to be some crazy stuff in there. Make sure you make the most of this new tool!