Ultimate Guide To Negative Keywords

CONTENT

• What is Negative Keyword
• Where You can add Negative Keyword
• Importance of Selecting Negative Keyword
• Match types of Negative Keyword
• How to find negative keywords
• Effective Negative Keywords List
• Conclusion

A negative keyword is a search term that enables you to filter your target audience on search engines. It is a type of keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered or clicked by a certain word or phrase. It allow you to remove search terms from your campaigns and help you to focus on keywords that matter to your customers. Negative Keyword plays same important role as a keyword check the Ultimate check list for Keyword Research.

For example, when you add “free” as a negative keyword to your campaign or ad group, you tell AdWords not to show your ad for any search containing the term “free”. On the Display Network, your ad is less likely to appear on a site when your negative keywords match the site’s content.

When we talk about the negative keywords, one thing automatically comes in mind that these keywords have the bad impact on something. As the name describe, negative keywords are the keywords that are not useful in generating sales in a Google Adwords Campaign.

In Online Advertisement, when someone searches for the keyword phrases that you have included as the negative keyword then your advertisement will not show to them. It is very important to build a negative keyword list to maximize the ROI of an AdWords campaign.

For Example, A is the manufacturer of silver jewelry so he will advertise for “silver jewelry” but not for the keywords “gold jewelry” or “Artificial jewelry” so the term “gold”and “Artificial” would be added as the negative keyword.

In the example, you can understand that if the ad is shown to the customer who is looking for the artificial or gold jewelry and your ad shows to him, it’s of no use. Impression will be counted costing you hard cash and also if the customer goes to your site and find it of no use it will close the window increasing the bounce rate and loosing some amount of faith in your brand too.

This is another decision that you are faced with once you create your list of negative keywords and decide what match types to use for them.

1. Account Level
2. Campaign Level
3. Ad Group Level

Adding negative keywords at an account level will block search queries that are not relevant to the campaigns.

Example:
Let’s say we sell clothes for children only (even when we have several ad groups and campaigns, all for different types of clothes and colors).We know for a fact that whenever someone is looking for men’s clothes or women cloths, we don’t want our ads to be triggered.
So in this case, we would like to add men’s clothes and women cloths (and variations of this term) as negative keywords at an account level. We then create one common list with the negative terms in question, and add all those campaigns that aren’t relevant to those terms.

Adding negative keywords at a campaign level will block search queries that are not relevant to ad groups within the entire campaign.

Example:
Let’s say you have a Ladies Purse store. If you only specialize in Leather Purse and all your ad groups apply only to Leather Purse types, then our negative keywords for plastic, cotton, Polyester, Velvet etc material should all be set at a campaign level.

Important to Note:
Adding these at Campaign level will work as a default negative keyword for future ad groups, so it’s important to choose carefully.

Adding Negative Keyword at ad group level, it’s very totally different.

Example:
Let’s retake our Ladies Purse store example and now imagine it to be a Ladies Purse store selling different variety. We have ad groups for leather purse, cotton purse, Polyester purse, Velvet purse, and yellow shoes.
Considering that our ad groups are specific to a certain style, it’s important that the
search queries in our leather purse ad group don’t trigger searches for plastic purse.
In order to avoid this, we would add Plastic purse in broad, or plastic purse in exact or phrase at ad group level within our “leather purse” ad group.
This help to increase relevance between the ads and keywords, which directly makes them specific to search queries.

• High volume traffic without risk: –

  As you will not get searched for the unrelated keyword, your Click Through Rate (CTR) will improve. You will be spending money on clicks that are going to be converted with more chances.

• Your ad will not show somewhere that could be harmful for your business:-

  Suppose someone sells only white shoes and get search for the term black shoes then it will be harmful for his business. The Ad campaign cost plus increase in the bounce rate, it will be harmful for any business.

• By selecting the negative keyword, you can focus on target audience: –

  If you are the manufacturer of Kids wear then use the term like men and women as the negative keyword.

• Negative Keywords increase your quality score: –

  As you will get higher CTR, you will accomplish a good quality score which will lower down the overall cost of your campaign. Quality score is a rank of how relevant and beneficial a search engine thinks your business is to someone searching for your products and services online. Quality score ranks impacts both the cost and position of your pay-per-click ads on the search engine results page.

          

• Negative Broad Match: – This is the default type of negative keyword. It will filter out the search terms that contain the words or phrases anywhere within the search query. For example, Negative broad matchkeyword :
  

  gold jewelry.

 

Search Term	Will Ad show
Sterling silver jewelry	Yes
14K Gold Item	Yes
14K gold jewelry	No
Jewelry made up of Gold	No

 

• Negative Phrase Match:- The ad will not show for the searches that include the exact keyword. When the keywords are used in the same order the ad will notshows
  

  even if additional keywords are used.

Ex : Negative Phrase Match : “gold jewelry”

Search Term	Will Ad show
gold jewelry	No
14K Gold Item	Yes
14K gold jewelry	No
Jewelry made up of Gold	Yes

 

• Negative Exact Match:-  You ad will not show if the exact keyword is used in the search term without any extra word.

Ex : Negative exact match : [gold jewelry]

Search Term	Will Ad show
gold jewelry	No
14K Gold Item	Yes
14K gold jewelry	Yes
Jewelry made up of Gold	Yes

• Search Query Report :-

  Go to the Google keyword tool and search for the terms that are related to your ad. You can see the other keywords which get searched when putting your keyword or phrases. Now you have a list of keywords from which you can select the negative keywords for your Adwords Campaign.

• Tools :- 

  You can use tools like keywordtool.io or ubersuggest.org to get the suggested keywords that are related to your search term. These predicted keywords help you to know what terms are related to your keywords so that you can remove the unwanted keywords.

• Google SearchPrediction :–

  Google also shows the suggestion when you type something on Google. You can find the keywords that are unrelated to your ad and add them to the negative keyword list.

      (For more details how to get suggested keywords and how to use more tools for that, you can read our previous blog Increase Traffic to upto 176% with BIG BANG of Keyword Research)

• Competitor Research :-

  Use competitor’s terms as negative keywords, like their brand name, their products name. If you know brands who have the similar but different market you could exclude them as their audience will not be interested in your products. For examples,  if you sell women’s sandals, you could use the brands who specialize in men’s sandals as negative keywords.

• Misspellings and Typing Mistakes : – 

  Sometimes people make spelling mistakes while searching, your ad can get searched for that misspelled term. So after finding the negative keywords, you should search for their misspellings too to add them in the list of your negative keywords.

• Analytics :-  

  Analytics shows the data about your website, for what keyword it is getting searched for. Check the keywords with high traffic and no conversions and then add them as the negative keyword. Because if a keyword is not giving any conversion then showing the ad for that keywords will be a loss only.

EFFECTIVE NEGATIVE KEYWORDS LIST

• For avoiding your ad to get searched for educational keywords
  • Class
  • College
  • Courses
  • School
  • Training
  • Teaching
  • University

• Avoiding discount concepts and bargains
  • Bargain
  • Deal
  • Discount
  • Discounted
  • Economical
  • Free
  • Negotiation

• Avoiding Job-related search terms
  • Application
  • Career
  • Jobs
  • Internship
  • Office
  • Profession
  • Recruiter
  • Salary

• Information search negative keyword
  • Article
  • Analysis
  • Audit
  • Inspection
  • Report
  • Information
  • Rating

• B2B search advertising campaign
  • Free
  • Clearance
  • Gifts
  • Online
  • Consumer
  • Download

• For manufacturing industry
  • Exporter
  • Import
  • Export
  • Importers
  • Rental
  • Vintage
  • Antique

These are some keywords list that you can use in your Google AdWord campaign to prevent the searches for the unrelated keyword.

For more details you can check these blogs also