How to Make The Most of Negative Keywords

In PPC advertising negative keywords are arguably as important as your regular keywords. Negative keywords ensure:

• You only pay for what works
• You’re not getting irrelevant traffic to your website
• Users are more likely to convert

Search query reports in Google Adwords show you the exact search terms they have triggered your ad to be shown, which is great for identifying negative keywords to add. But the only problem with doing this is the terms have already given you traffic so it’s best to try prevent terms you don’t want your ad showing for before. Here are some tips to help you make the most of the negative keywords in Google Adwords:

Identify Products You Don’t Sell

The first place to start identifying the negative keywords to place in your account is by looking at your product list. Are there any particular products you don’t sell or have run out of stock for? For example, if you sell sports jackets but you don’t sell Nike ones, then you should set ‘Nike’ as a negative keyword so your ads are not shown for these searches. Look at your competitors websites and identify if they sell any products that you don’t, which are likely to trigger a keyword similar to the ones you’re using (on a phrase or broad match). Also, identify any types of products, brands, colours that you don’t sell which people are likely to be searching for and set these as negatives too.

Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword Tool is a really handy tool to see search volumes for keywords and show you opportunities for keywords to target, but it can be equally as useful to show related keywords which aren’t as useful. A good exercise is to take your keywords from an ad group and put them in the keyword ideas tool. This will show you any related terms and may highlight any which are not relevant to what you’re selling.

Cross Campaign/Ad Group Negatives

You want the ad copy a user sees to be the most relevant ad you have in your account, right? Setting ‘Cross Campaign Negatives’ ensure that your campaigns and ad groups are tight enough so that different phrase (or broad) matches don’t appear for the wrong campaign. For example, you may have two ad groups within one campaign – sports jackets and jackets. A search for ‘sports jacket’ could trigger an ad in either ad group if you have jacket on a phrase ad group. In this case you should set ‘sports’ as a negative keyword. Probably not the best example I could ever give, but it’s Monday and it’s been a long day!

Why is this important? By keeping your keyword grouping tight from ad group to ad group/campaign to campaign, you can ensure you’re using the most appropriate ad copy, URL’s and the right bid (you may want to bid less on certain ad groups).

Find Out What People Are Saying About Your Brand

No brand is free from a bit of bad publicity, it happens and even though it’s now easier with social media it’s easier to voice your ‘Brand Voice’ to help maintain your reputation and manage this bad press, there’s still something you can use negative keywords to help. If your brand or industry has had some bad press, you can use search engines to find related stories or see what people are saying on social media to give you some ideas of negative keywords to include in your campaigns. Terms like, ‘scam’, ‘rip off’, ‘con’are generally ones you’d want to include so your ad doesn’t show.

Obviously every case is different and things like this can be a delicate situation, but generally you wouldn’t want your brands ad to be shown for a keyword that wouldn’t show you in a good light.

Test Different Negative Keyword Match Types

Just like regular keywords, you are able to select broad, phrase or exact matches for your keywords. Usually exact or phrase matches are most appropriate, but you don’t want to restrict yourself too much and miss out on impressions and clicks so be careful when choosing the match type for your keywords.

Feel free to share your tips for making the most of your negative keywords below! Thanks for reading 🙂

Laura

What University Doesn’t Teach You About Digital Marketing

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs recently from university students doing Digital Marketing courses/modules, while I think it’s great to do a relevant course (and let’s face it’s a lot more interesting than some), it’s only really a good starting point.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure these courses teach you the basics about digital marketing and strategy, but I dont think its really a subject that can be taught. 3/4 years experience over a degree should be worth so much more in the industry. Here’s what university doesn’t teach you about digital marketing:

How to Cope With Client Demands & Questions

Why did my PPC campaign overspend? Why have we moved from page 1 to page 2 in natural rankings? How quickly can you get xx done? How can you get me exposure on Facebook tomorrow? These are the types of questions you could be asked by your client (or managers) and you’ve got to be able to think quickly to give answers they want to hear! University can’t teach you to do this; experience does!

How to Juggle Your Time/Priorities

While to some extent going to university will teach you how to prioritise and manage your time to meet deadlines, it’s a whole a different ball game when you start to do it in business. When you’ve got countless number of tasks to do for various clients, this is where prioritising and time management creates a whole new meaning!

How a Panda or Penguin Can Screw You Over

Another thing that I’m sure they don’t teach you at university is how Google’s algorithm updates can affect you. With regular changes with differing affects, it’s hard to keep on top of it let alone trying to update a syllabus around it! But these sort of updates by search engines have a huge impact on businesses SEO rankings so it’s definitely something everyone in digital marketing should be aware of.

Is Your Digital Marketing Ready For Christmas?

Okay, so I’m usually one of those people who doesn’t think or talk about Christmas until a week before (yes, a scrooge you might say), but it’s hard not to think about it when you work in the marketing industry. It’s so important for businesses to be ready for the biggest spending period of year and with the increase in consumers spending online it’s even more important to be prepared early.

These stats from eConsultancy speak for themselves:

• 80% of UK shoppers have reserved products online for collection in stores (up from 74% in 2011).
• 44% of UK shoppers always research purchases on the internet before buying offline.
• Just 4% never use the internet for product research.

With this in mind, here are a few tips to make sure your Digital Marketing is ready for the madness of Christmas spending and help optimize your campaigns to the max!

Social media

Are you actively pushing your offerings around the Christmas period on all social media channels? If not, why not?! There isn’t a better place to voice your brand and offers. Be that Pinterest, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter or Instagram, if your customers are hanging out there, you should be reaching those people and engaging with them!

PPC

If there was only one month of the year you could make yourself appear on a search engine results page (SERP) then now would be the time. Just having your PPC campaign active isn’t enough though, optimisation is needed so you can make the most of all the searches. These few things are key in increasing your sales: