When creating a search campaign, you want to make sure you have the right recipe for success: a bowl of targeted keywords mixed with a pinch of catchy ads makes a great search campaign recipe. But what happens when someone does a search query that has nothing to do with your campaign and your ad shows up? This calls for a negative match keyword list.
A negative keyword list is a list of words you enter into your search campaign so your ad won’t appear for that particular search query. For example, if your brand is V8 Juice, you would have “engine” as a negative, so when someone searches for “V8 engines,” your ad will not appear.
There has been debate on whether adding negative terms could hurt campaigns by limiting the amount of traffic to their respective website. I recommend that if your campaign goal is to only drive traffic, try to limit your negative keyword list so you can get as many impressions as possible. But if your campaign has a conversion goal, a negative keyword list will help maintain quality leads to your site and cut total costs. If you aren’t currently using them in your campaign, don’t be scared. Add a few and monitor; you may see amazing results!
Here are some key steps for identifying the negative keywords and adding them to your campaign:
- Pull or request a search query report from the search engines. This list will show all of the terms that have triggered your ads. You can go through the list to determine if there are terms that are irrelevant to your campaign and add them as a negative keyword.
- Use a keyword tool that will come up with search terms based around the term you put in. Go through this list to find terms that are irrelevant to your type of business or marketing objectives.
- Think of terms that you don’t want your ad to appear for when someone searches on that term.
- Compile your complete list of negative terms and add them into your campaign.
Note: You may be able to add negatives on different account levels, depending on the engine.
I recently worked with a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company, and one of their products was salsa – the kind you eat, not an actual form of dance. So, I wanted to make sure “dance” was listed as a negative. I set the negative match type to Broad to stop any queries with “salsa dance”. To my surprise, I found thousand and thousands of queries that had dance lessons, dance music, musica bailar, boob dance!?! The list goes on and on. These queries triggered my ad because of Google’s Extended Broad Match option (this option varies by accounts). This option is a little tricky, because for this CPG company, their ad could be displayed based on “salsa” when someone searches for “dance lessons.” I started setting those negative words to either Phrase or Exact match, and continued to add more that were deemed irrelevant to attract the qualified engagement we were seeking. Before I knew it, the campaign’s negative keyword list was almost as long as its regular search term list.
I think I may start a petition for an additional match type for negative keywords – AV (abbreviated for Any Variation). By adding this match type, I am telling the user interface of any engine that I don’t want this query to show under any circumstances. That will cut down on the great game of “Search Query Madness” where you, the player, have to weed through thousands of search queries to find those sneaky irrelevant terms that are hurting your campaign and propel you toward ultimately getting the queries that you want. Ultimately, with the right choice of terms, negative keywords can be a positive addition to your search campaign. Maybe my vision of the “AV” match will come in the future, but until then, Happy Searching!
For all of the client accounts I work for, our teams have extensive negative keywords lists. We have seen positive results from this via a decrease in impressions and an increase in quality clicks.
So for Jaguar, we’re not showing up on search of the Jacksonville Jaguars and for financial clients with bonds, we don’t show up on Barry Bonds or James Bond searches.
But some negatives to add aren’t even that obvious.
Luckily we pull Web files from client trending tools as well as through our own tools available through the interfaces.
However, thank goodness we don’t rely on tools alone because the human brain works much smarter than the computer brain to know which keywords are truly relevant for a client and which are not…. even Google’s keyword tool within the account itself has recommended some eyebrow-raising, belly-achingly laughable keyword suggestions.
I like your AV match option. I’ll sign that petition!
Great post, Allana!
I absolutely agree with you about the importance of negative keyword lists. I think this is a highly underused method of managing campaigns.