Negative Keywords - How Being Negative Can Have a Positive PPC Effect

Negative keywords offer an opportunity to strategically restrict your search engine marketing (SEM) advertisements.

This is important, because effective PPC management means consistently expanding your keyword portfolio while simultaneously refining the list of keywords you're already bidding on.

Creating an environment where you can dynamically create effective negative keywords allows you to:

• Improve Click-Through Rate (CTR) - Ensuring that your ads aren't running against irrelevant queries means exposing your account to fewer uninterested impressions. This means that the percentage of people who click on your ad will be greater. (CTR refers to the percentage of the searchers who have actually viewed your ad, who then decide to click on it.)
• Create More Relevant Ad Groups - By weeding out keywords that aren't related to your business, you are tightening the relevance of your Ad Groups. Closely related Ad Groups allow you to create a single message that speaks to the entire group of meta keywords.
• Save Money - By avoiding paying for useless clicks, you're saving yourself money. Additionally, by creating more relevant keyword groupings with higher AdWords click through rates, you are helping to raise your Quality Score, which will also lower your costs.

In this tutorial, we'll talk a little bit more about what negative keywords are, and show you how to leverage our keyword tools to create negative keyword lists that will save you money and improve your ad campaign performance.

what are negative keywords?

"Negative Keywords" refer to a pay-per-click advertising match type offered by most of the major search engines.

There are a couple things to keep in mind with regards to negative keywords:

• They Serve as an Ad Filter - Creating a negative keyword will ensure that your ad doesn't show for that particular word.
  
• Apply to Expansive Match Types -  Negative keywords are useful when you are applying phrase or broad match within a Google AdWords account (or a similar expanded matching option; Yahoo's advanced match, for instance). In these cases, your keywords are being matched to multiple variations of a phrase, not all of which will be logical extensions of the phrase you're targeting, and not all of which will be pertinent to your business.

why the broad match & negative keyword combination?

But why not just use exact match and show only for the specific keywords you began by targeting?

There are two core reasons you don't want to show only for these broader phrases:

• Limiting Your Reach - While broad and phrase match will show your ad against unwelcome keyword variations, they also help your ad to display against highly valuable permutations of your keyword. In fact, limiting yourself to exact match causes you to leave most of the traffic on the table, as it ignores search engine marketing's long tail.
• Cost - "Head" or broader terms offer greater advertiser competition and typically cost you more per click than more specific variations.

So, the ideal situation would have us utilizing broad or phrase match, and mining our account for negative keyword candidates.

How WordStream's negative keyword tool Saves You Time and Money

Historically, discovering negative keywords is a monumentally laborious process. You want to implement broad and phrase matching options to capture more traffic, but how do you combat against irrelevant clicks and impressions?

One of the problems is that the AdWords platform offers limited visibility as to what, exactly, your ads are being matched against. Currently, if you want to see which user queries are triggering your ad, you can run a search query report. The problem here is that the report doesn't, you know: show you many of the actual queries:

As you can see, there are a large number of "unique queries" Google isn't showing me. Even if they were giving me a comprehensive report (I can get some of the queries from Google), what do I do then?

The next step, traditionally, is to export the keywords to Excel. This far from ideal for a few reasons:

• It's Time-Consuming and Manual - I'm spending a massive amount of time pulling reports, slogging through analytics, manipulating the data in Excel, then going back to my actual account to implement the changes.
• It's Static - New searches are coming in all the time; I'm probably going to be lucky to be able to repeat this process once a week.
• The Process Itself is Redundant - Pull a search query report for your account; a lot of your keywords are generating relevant clicks (if not, you've probably quit advertising via this channel) so why are you bothering to look at the good stuff every week? Ideally you would have a report that shows you only things you haven't reviewed yet.

WordStream offers an innovative negative keyword tool that will help you to lower costs and improve Quality Score if used properly.

Getting Started With WordStream's Negative Keyword Tool

When you set up a WordStream account, you'll build a keyword database with our keyword generator, keyword research and Web analytic tools. You'll then utilize our keyword grouping tools to effectively segment your keyword database.

From there, you start to tell WordStream about your business. You do this by identifying what types of words are and aren't important to you. The tool can then start to suggest negatives to you, while offering you an automated negative keyword solution.

Let's take a look at how this works.

In the above screen shot, WordStream is scanning your remaining keyword database to reveal keyword clusters.

What this means is that you have already created keyword groups. In creating a Keyword Group, you're telling the software "this keyword is important to my business". Thus, WordStream clusters keywords together and "asks" you whether a keyword should be considered negative or positive.

NOTE: This same process can be applied to keyword groups you are looking to clean up; so if we had a "books" group with several segmentations (used books, cheap books, etc.), we could look at all of the remaining keywords for negative candidates; it's also worth noting that a group doesn't need to have sub-groups for you to look for negatives. The tool will offer the same negative suggestions and automated negative keyword solutions whether a group has sub-segmentations or not.

So next you'll look at the keywords, and decide which clusters do and don't have to do with your business:

By clicking blacklist, you're telling WordStream to designate that keyword as a negative.

You'll then be prompted to review the action you're about to perform. Let's imagine that although we sell used books, we don't carry any textbooks:

By clicking "OK" you'll set the keyword to a negative broad match. You can learn more about negative match types here.

You can also create an exact negative match by hand typing the keyword you'd like to create an exact or phrase match negative for and pulling down the drop down on the left hand site, as pictured:

Once you choose a negative keyword match type, you'll be shown a final confirmation screen which will outline the impact of this particular action on your WordStream account:

This screen is showing you that the "used book" keyword segmentation will have two keywords removed, and that the all keywords bucket will have sixteen keywords removed.

Helping WordStream Help You to Find Negatives

But what if you see a segmentation in the suggestions that isn't a good negative candidate? Sure, you don't sell text books, but you're definitely a bookstore! That's a great term for you!

You can simply set that term to positive:

And what if the keyword is neither obviously positive or obviously negative? The term "hand" for instance: we certainly can't discern simply by "hand" whether or not associated keywords should be positive or negative.

In this case, simply "ignore" this suggestion for now, and WordStream will offer you a new suggestion:

By sifting through segmentations and designating positives, negatives, and keyword clusters that are too vague ("ignored" keyword clusters), you are teaching WordStream about your keyword database. Spending a bit of time defining your keyword database in this way allows the software's additional negative suggestions (which we'll discuss below) to be that much more powerful (you are informing the way that WordStream automates the discovery of negative keywords).

Have Negative Keywords Suggested to You

Now, the tool will suggest negative candidates to us: 

We can simply click the button and reveal a second type of "negative" segmentation suggestion:

Here we see the WordStream negative keyword tool at work. It is using "rejected" keywords to make negative suggestions.

In this case, we told the tool that we don't sell textbooks. WordStream took a look at our keyword database and realized that a lot of the phrases that contained "textbooks" also contained "college", and suggested to us that college may also be a good term to create a negative filter for.

You can use this same functionality to have positives suggested for you; the tool will look at the keywords you've deemed "positive" and find related keyword clusters that you may also want to whitelist:

Here, we're "teaching" the software about our business. In this way, we can create an intelligent automation environment that is both data and human driven, saving us time without allowing the tool to wrest control from its operators.

create relevant negative keyword lists

So, why is this functionality valuable?

• Create a Personalized Negative Keyword List - WordStream is utilizing the application's Web analytics tools to constantly mine your website's PPC traffic and organic search visitors.
• Enjoy Negative Keyword Suggestions from Real Search Traffic - Setting a negative keyword is only valuable if you are actually restricting real traffic from real searchers: queries you would otherwise be bidding on.

WordStream enables you to collect a list of all of the keywords people have used to visit your site via search. What's left after you group your keywords is an actual, real life list of search terms people associate with your site, and terms that you are actually bidding on.

• Ease of Discovery - Just browse the list of ungrouped keywords, and filter out words or phrases you want excluded from your campaign in seconds (see the WordStream Assigning Negative Keywords Guide for a detailed explanation of how negative keyword filters are set).

The WordStream negative keyword tool offers you a dynamic solution that will help to keep your costs down while saving you time.

Try WordStream's negative keyword generator for free today

To start discovering valuable negative keywords today, you can:

• Try WordStream Free
• Request a Live Demonstration
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