EBizInsider

Anyone who has set up a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign knows the work and care required to target the right set of keywords for your site. However, the irrelevant traffic you worked so hard to avoid is still sneaking in to your account. It’s time to learn about the positive benefits that negative keywords can have on your PPC.

A Keyword Primer

First, let’s have a short lesson on regular keywords. When you bid on a keyword, you have to choose a match type. Match types determine the variety of traffic that your keywords can trigger. Three common varieties of Google Adwords include broad, phrase and exact match types. Broad match keywords bring in the greatest variety of traffic, while phrase and exact are more restrictive. The broad match of “cufflinks” can bring in traffic from users who search all of these phrases: “cufflinks”, “solid gold cuff link”, “kuff link”, and “win free cufflinks”. Broad match is the fastest way to capture a wide selection of relevant traffic, which makes it an important part of your PPC campaigns. However, broad match can also attract a lot of keywords in which you aren’t interested. This is where negative keywords work their magic.

Negative Positives

If you sell cufflinks but you don’t actually have a solid gold pair for sale, then “solid gold” would be a great negative keyword. Additionally, if you aren’t planning on giving them out for free, then “free” is another negative you should add to your account. You can add your negatives directly into individual ad groups, or they can be placed at the campaign level if the negatives are applicable to multiple categories.

Identifying Negatives

Now you can block unwanted traffic, but how do you actually find that traffic in the first place? If you’re not using negative keywords, you can almost guarantee that some of the PPC traffic currently coming to your site is unwanted. There are three great places you can go to start your negative keyword hunt. The first is in your initial keyword research. When you plug your core keywords into a keyword research tool, there are terms you choose not to use. Go back to that tool and take a look at the keywords you didn’t add to your campaigns. Was it because the volume or the cost per click was too high? Or did you pass those keywords by because they had nothing to do with your business? Add those irrelevant keywords to your negative keyword list!

Do Your Homework

The Search Query Report from Google Adwords allows you to see the actual search queries that are triggering your ads. Many of the search queries are the actual keywords on which you are bidding. Keep digging and you’ll start seeing variations that you aren’t bidding on, and this is where it gets interesting. Let’s run a search query report for the cufflinks ad group we were working with earlier. We found some individual styles that you don’t carry: “dragon cufflinks” “copper cufflinks” and “plastic cufflinks”. None of these keywords had a large volume. In fact, blocking them only saved you around $1. But running Search Query Reports and blocking lower traffic keywords can turn into big savings in the long run.

The final tool for researching negative keywords is your own analytics program. Google Analytics allows you to view the keywords driving traffic to your site. You can parse them out by paid (PPC) and non-paid (organic) keywords. Then you can analyze stats that include pages per visit and bounce rate. Not only is analytics a great tool for finding negative keywords, it provides additional insight into how all your keywords are performing.

Update, Update, Update

Like the rest of your keywords, negatives should be periodically reviewed. If you add new inventory to your store, be sure negatives aren’t blocking newly relevant traffic. As your business grows, you may find that you don’t need to be as restrictive with some categories as you once were. Negatives are a critical part in the success of your paid campaigns. Isn’t it time you started feeling the positive effects of negatives on your PPC?

By Jean Lloyd
jeanl@ebizinsider.com

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