Most of the time, making mistakes are unavoidable but correcting those mistakes at the right time is very important. In PPC space, negative keywords are very essential, and ignoring them can cost you your precious budget.
What Are Negative Keywords
A lot has already been spoken about negative keywords but let’s give our brains a little exercise. Negative keywords prevent your ads from appearing on SERP for irrelevant search terms. In other words, it will stop your ads to be found by those search terms which are not related to your brand or services.
Negative keywords can solve these purposes:
- Help advertisers to better target their ads
- Reduces the cost, improve ROI & CTR
- Good control on your precious budget
- Improved CTR will help to improve quality score
Once we know the benefits of using negative keywords in our PPC account, we need to take the step ahead to optimize these keywords for better results.
So, now when we know how important negative keywords are, what’s next? We need to avoid making those mistakes which can harm your PPC account.
Here are some of the common points one should remember while using Negative Keyword in the PPC account.
Ignoring Negative Keywords Altogether – It is very surprising that many advertisers do not wish to use negative keywords in their PPC campaigns. These accounts can be troubled by unwanted clicks and an exhausting budget. Adding negative keywords to these accounts will help you to reduce wasted ad spend. It is recommended to dive into the search term report and find out which terms are good ones and which ones are bad.
Not Choosing Proper Negative Keywords Match Type – Negative keywords match types help to make us understand how the negative keyword should work in stopping the irrelevant search terms. But to choose the best match type is a tough task. So it is vital to review your search queries on a regular basis to see which match type is effective. The use of a search query report will help to analyze the performance of your campaign and you can fine-tune your match type.
Not Consulting The Standard List Of Negative Keywords – When we have multiple campaigns to handle, adding negative keywords becomes quite exhausting. This manual labor causes us to do mistakes. A negative keywords list allows to share negative keywords between campaigns and it is super convenient. It is one good place to put all your keywords which you wish to exclude.
Check out our posts on creating a shared negative keyword list and the types of negative keyword list one can use.
Not Adding Negative Keywords At The Right Level – Negative keywords can be added at a campaign level and ad group level. We need to know where to place them to get the maximum out of our PPC account. For example, you have an online business of selling Kitchen appliances and you are running a campaign for “Refrigerators”. Let us assume that you do not offer doorstep service or extended warranty so “doorstep”, “warranty”, “extra guarantee” etc would be the negative keywords you would wish to add at the campaign level.
But let’s imagine, within your “Refrigerator” campaign, you would have “Samsung”, “Whirlpool” & “IFB” ad groups. So for “Samsung”, you would like to add “Whirlpool” and “IFB” into your ad group level as negative keywords. You just need to cross-check that you do not end up creating replicas of your negative keyword across your account.
Not Checking Negative Keywords Conflict With Bidded Keywords – If you are handling an account with multiple campaigns you might not notice that a negative keyword you added is conflicting with a bidded keyword. And it means that your negative keyword is blocking an ad from showing for a keyword you are bidding on.
So before adding any keyword as negative keyword, you might wish to check your existing keyword list too.
Not Expanding Your Negative Keywords – If you think that adding negative keywords only once would be enough, then you are wrong. As your ads start floating on the search engine, your audience reach increases and so does your search query data.
So, reviewing the terms often becomes all the more important in order to find prospect keywords and negative keywords. Here is a helpful guide to help expand your negative keywords.
To Conclude
Negative keywords help telling Google for which search terms you do not want your ads to appear. So it becomes important to make use of them to gain most out of your PPC campaign.
Identifying negative keywords for large accounts or multiple client accounts can be tedious if done manually. An automated negative keywords discovery tool can save tons of time and effort for the PPC Manager. Not to mention, this will also save the wasted ad spend on Google Ads. Give our negative keywords tool a try.
Our Negative Keywords Tool is Free for accounts with ad spend less than $10,000 per month. Save 10-20% of your search ad spend for free.
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