There are over 1,022,000 words in the English language. With so many choices it’s difficult to know which ones can help your business and which ones will waste time and money.
Writers and marketers spend hours trying to choose the right words to help propel their brand into success. All that time and advertiser money are wasted if you choose keywords that are too broad. Or if you choose words that have multiple meanings.
That’s where negative keywords come in. This feature allows you to avoid certain keywords that may drive up your Adwords bill without getting you traffic.
If you want to learn how to use this to help bring you, customers, then keep reading.
What are Negative Keywords?
Before we teach you how to use negative keyword lets first answer the question “what is a negative keyword?” A negative keyword allows you to filter out certain terms from your PPC search results.
Heres an example. Let’s say you run a business that sells new gaming consoles. If someone searches used gaming consoles you wouldn’t want your ad to show up so you would make the term “used” a negative keyword. Once you do this if someone searches used gaming consoles your add will no longer appear.
In laymen’s terms, this tells Google which keywords you shouldn’t display your ads for.
Use Negative Keywords to Benefit Your Adwords Campaign
Since you understand what are negative keywords good for. Let’s go in depth about how negative keywords can help your Adwords campaign.
The first thing you should do is negative keyword research. If you’ve been in marketing long enough you understand the importance of competitor research and how it can impact how many sales you get.
The best way to find keywords to leave out of your search is to use Wordtracker’s Keywords Tools. Search through the tool to find keywords you don’t want to be included in searches about you.
The next option for using this tool is to look up search queries in your Google AdWords account. This tool will give you an idea about which search terms people are using to look you up. If you find there are terms that don’t fit your product being used to search for you consider those negative keywords.
Make a Good Negative Keyword List
You know that negative keywords can help advertisers. But how do you ensure that you have the negative keywords will be excluded from future searches?
You make your negative keywords list. This list tells Google which words to exclude. Phrase, broad, broad match modifier, and exact matches still apply here.
Example of KW to exclude:
[used gaming consoles]
In this case, the brackets tell Google that it should find the exact keyword match while the “-” tells Google to leave out these phrases.
Add the Negative Keywords to Your Account
The final step is to add these keywords to your Adwords account. The first step is to go into tools the ‘Edit campaign Negative Keywords.’ Then past your list into the ‘Enter words manually’ box and press ‘Add keywords.’
And now you know how to use negative keywords to your campaign.
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Using negative keywords is the first step to tailoring your ad campaign to your audience. But if you want more advice to perfect your campaign then book a call today!