Using negative keywords in your PPC (pay-per-click) campaign is important to your budget as well as the general performance of your campaign. When running a PPC campaign, a lot of people only think about the words they want their ads to show for, completely forgetting the ones they don’t want to show for. This happens more often than you think.
In the PPC world, a useful list of words is the negative keyword list. This is a list comprised of terms you DO NOT want your ads to show for. It is important to use negative keywords. Building a negative keyword list can help improve your relevancy (which increases your quality score, which lowers your bids, etc etc!), improve your CTR and help with your overall ROI since you are no longer paying for traffic you are not interested in or that is not interested in you.
Without negative keywords, you are potentially paying for traffic you are not in the least bit interested in. If your keyword is “Snow removal calgary” as a broad match term, you don’t want to be showing up for “snowman building contest in whistler”, so you could add “snowman” and “whistler” as negative keywords.
Negative impressions have a big impact on all sorts of things in your PPC campaign. Take the previous example of the snow removal company. They are showing up for all sorts of terms with the word “snow” in it but users aren’t clicking on the ads. This now drives up impressions and leaves clicks low. This causes the CTR to be low which decreases the quality score, which drives up your costs! Or, someone who is searching for the snowman building contest actually clicks on the ad – good for the CTR, bad for your budget. You now have wasted $1.50 or whatever your bid is on nothing at all! Now if this happens 10 times a day, you just threw $15 out the window. Now multiply that over a month. You get the picture.
Google has a great report called the Search Query Report which allows you to see which terms users have actually searched for AND have seen your ad as a result of it. This is a great report to use when building your negative keyword list. If there is a word on there that is not relevant, add it to the list. Keep adding words to this list. Running this report once a month or once every couple of months will allow you to build a nice negative keyword list and eventually you will be showing mainly for the terms which are profitable for you!
Use caution when adding negative keywords though. You don’t want your negative keyword list to limit your searches. Make sure you are adding only those terms that really are irrelevant to your campaign.
If you need help with your account or have any questions, contact us here at Anduro Marketing!