One area that often gets neglected in a Pay-Per-Click campaign is that of negative keywords. If you are in a very competitive area, you want to make sure that your advertising budget goes to the right prospects. Building a comprehensive negative keyword list is one way that will help achieve this aim.
Here are some ideas that might help you with this task
So firstly, there are two places that you can place negative keywords, one at the campaign level and the second is at the adgroup level. General negative keywords can be added at the campaign level, but more specific ones will be targeted at the adgroup level.
Here are a few ideas you can use for your adgroups:
- At the adgroup level, go to your keywords list and under the details click on all search terms. This will provide you with the complete list of searches that triggered a click on your ad. If there are any in there that are not suited mark them as a negative keyword
- Use the new keyword planner – type in a general keyword for example meeting rooms. You’ll get a list presented to you, items on this list could well trigger your ad for meeting rooms “room design” and “room for rent” are definitely two negative keywords you’ll want to add to this group
- If each adgroup had very targeted keywords assigned then those keywords shouldn’t trigger any other adgroups, so put them as a negative in your other ads.
- Check back over the negatives you have already added – are they still valid?
Some general negative keywords you might like to use at campaign level.
You want to avoid certain types of searches, for example people looking for jobs, or looking for education and of course cheap! so there are keywords that you can put in to avoid some of these searches they include words like
- job, jobs, salary, recruit,
- classes, university, college, education
- bargain, free, discount, cheap
all of these keywords can easily be put in as negatives to your campaign.
If you do this at the start of the year, then you will save some advertising pennies!