If you’re running a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign then you know how important it is to get together your negative list of keywords. Without negatives you’ll be spending money on search terms that you really don’t want. But how do you start to put this list together? here are some tips for you.

In no particular order of importance here’s some ideas for you

  1. Geography Negatives – If you’re targeting local geographies (so not a UK wide campaign) it is still a good idea to negatively match the geographic areas that you do not service. The way that Google targets geographically is via your IP address, on some occasions this can be some distance from your physical location so the visitor won’t be relevant for you also you’ll still get some searchers that want to look for stuff out of area.
  2. Resource Negatives – Quite frequently users will put in the search term ‘book’ ‘magazine’ ‘dvd’. If you do not supply these resources then these are good keywords to mark as a negative
  3. Search Query Report – Google makes it very easy for you now to see what actual keywords have triggered the clicks on your ad. Cast your eye over these and make sure there is nothing in there that you don’t supply. For example if you sell black shoes, but the term red shoes is mentioned in the report then that will suggest to you that you should negatively match all the colours of shoes you don’t supply.
  4. Google New Keyword Suggestions – Quite frequently the new keywords that Google thinks will drive traffic to your site are not relevant to you, these could provide other keyword ideas.
  5. Job Seekers – You probably don’t want to pay for these guys, so negatively match keywords that visitors will use to find a job.
  6. A Thesaurus – Sometimes one of these can help, put in one negative keyword and see what else pops out!

When you have put together your list of keywords there are 3 places that you can enter them into your adwords account

  1. At the campaign level – so all adgroups in the campaign adhere to the negative rules
  2. At the Adgroup level – this can be useful to negatively match some of the keywords that drive other adgroups in your campaign
  3. At the shared campaign level – you can share a keyword list across all your campaigns, can be quite a time saver if its relevant

Of course each account is different and will require a unique set of rules but if you get your negatives right it will positively affect not only your click through rate but also your conversion.

Of course if this is a lot of gobble-de-gook to you then we can help with your Pay Per Click Management