Negative Keyword Lists: Why You Need Them

Adding negative keywords at both the campaign and the adgroup level can improve click through and conversion rates.


What are negative keywords?
Keywords you don't want your pay per click ad to appear for.

For example: If you sell cabinets online, you'll want to add "president's" and "presidential" to your negative keyword list. You definitely don't want your kitchen cabinet ad appearing when someone is researching the White House.

Screening out these kinds of searches benefits you whether people click on your sometimes irrelevant ad or not. When your add appears next to results for the presidential cabinet and people don't click, it suppresses your click-through rate, which is a major determinator of how you much pay when people do click on your ads.

You benefit even more by preventing those presidential cabinet searchers from clicking on your ad. Because when they do click on your ad (just on a whim), you'll have paid for a click that's never going to convert.

All three major pay per click search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN - offer the ability to add negative keywords. Its a feature you should absolutely be using. If you're not using negative keywords in your pay per click campaigns, spending even one hour creating a negative keyword list before you go to bed tonight could save you 10-30% of your ad spend.

Before I walk you through how to add negative keywords to your Adwords, Yahoo or MSN ppc account, let's go over how to pick negative keywords in more detail.

Get yourself over to Wordtracker's free keyword tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. Type in your primary keyword. For illustration, let's say you're a personal coach, so you search for "personal coach" and you get back 100 of the top phrases for that query.

Look over the list. I see a lot of keywords that refer to fitness or sports. If you're a business coach, not a fitness coach, those are the kind of words you want on your negative keyword list. Otherwise, every time someone searches for "personal soccer coach", your ad with show up.

So screening out all searches for "soccer", "fitness", "track", and "becoming" (you don't want to pay for clicks from wannabe personal coaches, just people looking to hire a personal coach) will make your ad show less often, but to people who are more likely to want what you're offering. In otherwords, it builds your ads relevance. And in pay per click, relevance is everything.

Let's run through one more example, and get our feet wet in the Google interface, too.

Go to Google's keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You can also access this from within your Google adwords account. Look under the "campaign management" tab under the link "tools".

Search again for "personal coach". Just above the list of keyword you get back, on the right side (just before the green section) is a pull down menu. The default setting is "Broad". Pull it down to "Negative" and you'll see a long list of suggestions for possible negative keywords for the primary keyword "personal coach".

Lower down on the page, Google will recommend additional, related keywords that you might also want to negative out, or just keep in a separate campaign or adgroup.

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Pay Per Click Articles:
> Negative Keyword Lists: Why You Need Them
> How To Add Negative Keywords To Adwords, Yahoo and MSN adCenter Accounts
> Dynamic Text in Adwords Ads
> How To Sort Out Traffic From Google.com and Google's Search Partners