Negative keywords are a critical part of all successful Adwords campaigns. Unfortunately, knowing how to use them can be a little tricky at first
In this video we cover a couple examples of negative keywords and how to properly implement them for a better Adwords ROI and higher CTR.
Transcript- What are Negative Keywords?
Hey, it’s Grayson from LeadCadence.com, and welcome to another episode of Frequently Asked Questions Friday. In this week’s episode we’re going to be answering the question: What are negative keywords?
Negative keywords are a list of keywords inside your Google AdWords account that explicitly tell Google to not show your ad if somebody types any of these words into the search box. I’ll give you a couple of examples that will hopefully make this a little easier to understand.
My family business where I grew up working is a street sweeping company. Somebody that’s searching for that service may go to Google and type in “sweeping Orange County” because our business is in Orange County.
If somebody’s searching for sweeping Orange County there’s a good chance that they are looking for what we offer. However, if somebody goes to Google and types in “chimney sweeping Orange County,” chimney sweeping is completely different than street sweeping, so the word chimney would be a negative keyword for us.
We would be telling Google that if somebody types in the word chimney into Google along with any string of keywords, that we don’t want our ad to show up.
Because we know that if somebody’s searching for chimney sweeping that it’s not a service that we can provide them, and if our ad shows up there’s a chance that they may still click on it and cost us money, and they’re never going to turn into a customer because we just don’t offer ever service.
Chimney would be the negative keyword in our account, or at least one of them.
Another example kind of along those same lines is, like I said, we are in Orange County. I happen to also know that there is an Orange County, Florida, and we are in California. Somebody may be searching for sweeping Orange County. However, they may add in the word Florida or FL, the abbreviation for Florida at the end of the search, so “sweeping Orange County Florida.”
Google’s going to try its best to match the person’s search criteria to the best ad. Because there’s an Orange County in both they’re going to struggle to say somebody’s searching for sweeping Orange County. This is one’s pretty close. Let’s show it anyway.
If somebody’s searching for sweeping in Orange County, Florida we don’t have a business there so somebody’s going to click on our ad, they’re going to come to our website, and we’re not going to be able to service them, so again, we don’t get a customer, it costs us money, and they don’t get help.
For us, another negative keyword would be the word Florida or FL. That would explicitly tell Google that if somebody types in Florida or FL, that we don’t want our ad to show up to that searcher.
What this does is it helps cut down on the number of errors that searchers make because they can’t match up exactly the ad correctly, and it also helps lower our budget because people aren’t clicking on stuff that we’re never going to be able to satisfy. It makes our click-through rates go up, which is a great signal to the Google AdWords algorithm that we’re providing a good service to the people that are searching, so that also lowers our cost per click.
We’re not having all these people clicking on it that we can’t help so it’s going to lower our budget and our ad spend.
Those are negative keywords. I know they’re a little bit complicated. If you still have questions, put them in the comments below. I’ll do my best to answer them and see if I can come up with a couple more examples for you. That’s it for today. Thanks for stopping by Frequently Asked Questions Friday.
Have a great weekend. We’ll see you next week.