Negative Keywords in Google AdWords

Probably the quickest way to boost your campaigns click through rates, which unltimately leads to higher rankings, is to add negative keywords across your campaigns. You’ll also find that your conversion rates dramatically increase because your adverts are only being shown to searchers who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

Negative keywords are words or phrases that trigger your adverts without you wanting them to. Let me give you an example, if you were a shoe retailer and you had an AdWords campaign advertising under the term shoes, your adverts would get triggered by people searching for shoes, mens shoes, womens shoes, kids shoes, etc. and this is all fine, assuming you sell a wide range of shoes.

The problem occurs when people searching for horse shoes and brake shoes also trigger your advert. This has two dramatic effects upon your account. Firstly, it means your adverts are being shown to people who have no intention of buying a pair of shoes and therefore if they click your advert are wasting your budget. Secondly, if these people never click your advert, you won’t have wasted any money but your adverts click through rates will drop dramatically and you will end up having to bid more and more to keep your adverts on page one.

Our advice is to use keyword suggestion tools mentioned in the previous tip to build a negative keyword list and also check your web stats to see which search phrases visitors are using that are irrelevant to your product or service and then add all of these into your negative keyword list.

For help in doing this or to talk about this topic further, call one of our specialists on 0870 199 6382.