In the latest Paid Search Podcast session Chris Schaeffer and Jason Rothman discuss about Negative Keywords, which are those terms that are irrelevant to your business and are resulting in wasted ad spend. Their primary focus in this discussion is to help advertisers with the sources through which these negative keywords can be identified.
You can listen to the podcast here.
Here is the transcript of the audio, for your reference.
Transcript
Jason: Yes! Hey everybody. Welcome back to Episode Number 27 of the Paid Search Podcast with your buddies Jason and Chris, where we talk about Google AdWords, Google AdWords and Google AdWords. Chris, how’s it going?
Chris: Good.
Jason: Good.
Chris: I was trying to come up with something different. Every time I say I’m doing well, you know, I thought, “I’m going to say something different this time,” and then, I failed.
Jason: You’re always doing good, so we always start off the show with a joke.
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: And one time I put you on the spot, and you came up with a big fat zero.
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: So then you said the next week you’re always going to have a joke chamber.
Chris: I got one. I’m ready.
Jason: Right, let’s hear it.
Chris: All right guys. So, why don’t bears wear socks?
Jason: Why?
Chris: Because they have ‘bare’ feet!
Jason: Thanks Chris.
Chris: Naughty creature. My daughter tells that one…That’s my daughter’s joke and she is four and its very funny.
Jason: Oh, I’m sure it is. Good stuff, hey, bare feet. But, do you get it…? Like…?
Chris: Oh no, I don’t understand the joke at all.
Jason: I had another joke that’s probably not podcast say… It’s about a certain kind of woman…
Chris: Oh yeah….
Jason: …who tends to walk bare foot in Las Vegas. So, on today’s episode, Chris, we’re going to talk about Negative Keywords. I mean, this is something we talk about very often but it’s because it’s extremely and very important. So we always talk about them, where to add them, why you should add them, if you don’t know that by now….
Chris: [Laughter]
Jason: …it was never meant to be.
Chris: Get out [Laughter].
Jason: Yeah, if you don’t know a bee by now, you’ll never know. But yeah, so you should know now why you need to add negative keywords, but on this episode, we’re going to talk about how you actually find those, Chris. So Chris, I think in the first place, we’re going talk about where we find those actual negative keywords, is on the Search Terms Report.
Chris: Absolutely.
Jason: So why don’t you tell us how that works?
Chris: Alright. So, brief vocabulary lesson: Search Terms, Search Queries – synonyms, same thing, okay? So we may use those terms interchangeably. The current terminology is Search Term; Search Query is the old terminology. So Search Term, Search Query is what the person actually types into Google right before they click one of your ads. So you can find Search Terms on the “Keywords” tab. There are three sub-tabs under the “Keywords” tab, and the sub-tab on the right is labelled “Search Terms.”
These are all of the terms that are associated with whatever campaign or ad group you’re looking at at that moment. Very powerful. Jason and I talked about this a lot, because quality of traffic is determined by the intent of the person coming to your website at that moment.
Every person may have a potential of purchasing whatever it is that you’re selling, but if they’re not actually interested in purchasing whatever it is that you’re selling, and they’re doing a different type of search, the likelihood of that conversion goes way down. So that is why Search Terms are important, because we want to know exactly what their intent is.
Jason: Right.
Chris: And okay…. and there you go. Segway to Jason.
Jason: Right so, you want to know what their intent is, and in that Search Terms Report, you find what they search for, and then you can cherry pick out their negative keywords.
Chris: Right.
Jason: So if you are advertising for a dentist, and you want people to find his website, call his practice, become a patient, and you see that your ad showed up on the word “Dental School,” or “Dental School, Cleveland,” if you’re in Cleveland, then the word “School,” and the words “Dental School” or “University” – those sure will be negative keywords you add based on finding that data in the Search Queries Report.
Chris, one example I have is a painter down in Florida. And we started off advertising on a lot of geo keywords, but also just the regulars “Painters” phrase match. And it turns out, “Painters” phrase match brings in like, way way way too, kind of, broad Search Queries, and we get all this stuff about “Picasso” and “Party paint night” and “Paint in place” kind of stuff, and weird things like “The 1913 painting of a girl,” or whatever.
So we were shown up on a lot of weird stuff. And what I’ve noticed is that a lot of times in the accounts that I manage, one or two keywords is usually bringing in all those negative, all the poor Search Terms that you see on the Search Terms Report that you want to add as negatives. So you’ve got an interesting thing that you’ve taught me, where you can look at the Search Terms at the keyword level, and isolate one keyword at a time.
Chris: Right. And this isn’t immediately obvious. What you have to do, and I’m actually going to pull up a AdWords as I do this so I can guide through it. So if you’re looking at AdWords right now, you go to the “Keywords” tab, and you have a list of keywords, okay? Click the checkbox just to the left of one of those keywords, and you’ll notice when you click that checkbox, a couple of things will turn on. Or, previously, when there was nothing checked, they were de-emphasized; when you check the box, they become emphasized, for lack of a better term. They’re now clickable.
So you can then choose “Search Terms” – now there are two areas on your page right now that say Search Terms, I’m just specifically referring to the one towards the lower half of your screen, the one that’s right above the keywords. This is a button that you can actually click. So once you have the “Keyword” checked, you click the “Search Terms” button – not the tab, the button – and you hit “Now,” can review all the Search Terms associated with that one keyword.
This is great because like Jason said, if you have “Painters,’ or you know, broad-match terms and you’re really concerned, you know, you think this one is really contributing, you know, “Why is this one keyword contributing 80% of the traffic and nothing else?” the answer will be to look at those Search Queries and say, “Wow! It turns out I’m getting a tonne of really bad Search Queries simply because of this one keyword.”
So that’s where you go in, you add some negative keywords in, or you may decide, “You know what? I need to change this from broad to modified broad, or broad to phrase or exact, or something like that, or just pause it completely.” ‘
I highly recommend, you know, dissecting some of your, at least some of your top clicked keywords. I would not recommend this for keywords that have just a couple of clicks; it’s not really that useful. But for ones that are driving the majority of your traffic, I think this is a great way to diagnose, you know, how a keyword in particular is performing.
Jason: Right. Now, the next phase, Chris, that I find negative keywords from is the actual, probably the most valuable tool in the world that doesn’t cost any money, and that’s Google Search, google.com. Chris and I are in AdWords all the time, but when we’re managing our accounts, we are also, in building them, we’re also, we go outside of AdWords, and we go to Google Search, and you can pick up a lot of stuff, Chris, from just typing in a few of your keywords in Google and seeing what comes up.
So one of the ways you can see, find negative keywords is just type your word in Google and let the Autosuggest Bar come up, and see what they have for you.
Now when I was out of it earlier and not responding, what I was doing is I was searching “Dentist” in Google, and if you search “Dentist,’ one of the auto suggestions that comes up is “Dentist Career,” and then “Dentist Games.” So when you’re building out an account, if you’re a dentist, you want to use this information and add the word “Career” and “Games” as negative keywords.
Chris, another place I look is the bottom of the Search Results where they have those searches related to dentists.
Chris: Related, yeah, I know.
Jason: Yeah, down there we’ve got “Dentist Games,” “Dentist Job Description,” “How to become a Dentist,” so then you can take all of this and add “Description,” “How to,” “How to become,” “Become,” “Career,” “Games”… There is a “Cosmetic Dentist”; if they don’t do ‘Cosmetic Dentistry’, you can add “Cosmetic” as a negative. So those are all great, Chris, for finding negative keywords. And then the last place, Chris, why don’t you talk about the…using it to find competitor names.
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: Because a lot of these competitors get searched for actually, way more than the actual keywords themselves.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Now-a-days, when you have your phone and you need a phone number, you quickly search for that company’s name, right? And if you’re in a rush, you might click the very first thing that shows up in your Search Results. And it very often could be a paid ad. So if that’s the case, you could potentially waste a lot of money if you’re showing up for competitor listings. So, one does a search, they have absolutely no intention of purchasing your services – they just want the phone number because they want to find out where their carpet cleaner is, you know?
The carpet cleaner is 30 minutes late, they’ve already purchased the service and they want to call the office and say, “Hey, you guys just said you’ll be here at 3.” They click on your ad, they call… maybe they click on the “Click to Call” button, they have just spent your money on something that will absolutely never provide a turnaround for you; there will never be any conversion for that. And it was a complete waste, simply because you are driving clicks from competitor search terms.
Jason: Right.
And just because….again, you don’t target competitors’ names, if you’re using broad-match and even a little bit of broad match modifier of phrase, you can leave yourself eligible to showing up on lots of searches for competitors’ names.
So going to Google, typing in your keyword, like “Dentist” or “Dentist, Cleveland,” and seeing what those top ten competitors are, and then adding those names as negative keywords right off the bat can save you a lot of money, and it can save you a lot of conversations where your secretary, whoever picks up the phone, just goes, “Oh, you’ve got the wrong number.”
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: And then, they go, “Okay, thanks,” and then the secretary goes, “Okay, thank you. Well, have a good day,’ and just like that, 20 bucks out the….just like that.
Chris: Yeah.
Jason: It’s a 20 [inaudible 11:34] ….up the door.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I’ve specifically asked a lot of clients, you know, that I noticed that this was happening. I noticed that they were getting a lot of searches for other types of business names. This was specifically a bill bond company, they were getting a lot of searches for other bill bonds,. And I noticed, Jason, as you’ve taught me, that I can look at the call details in the “Dimensions” tab, and see how long those phone calls lasted. I noticed they were lasting all of 30 seconds, you know, one minute, something like that?
And, you know, I ask them, you know, “Are you guys getting a lot of calls?” And they said, “Yeah, we do get a lot of calls, people thinking we’re this other company.” And that was specifically due to competitor searches, and I was able to exclude all the different names that I saw coming in, and suddenly, the important terms were able to take the place of those competitor terms.
Jason: Right. I just experienced that about a month ago with a divorce lawyer here in Oklahoma City. And he came to me, and I went out and met with him after we set up a meeting and he was telling me that… And he likes to use colorful language that we are not going to use on the podcast, but he was going on and on about how f…king frustrated – I said F, then the word “king” – f…king frustrated he is when his secretary picks up the phone and they’re asking for a different lawyer. And they’re thinking, “We’re not that law firm. Why do people keep calling us?” And we solved that problem by adding those competitor names. And now he’s a very happy lawyer. So…
Chris: Happy lawyer, huh?
Jason: Well, I was going to say happy as lawyers get, so…
Chris: [Laughter]
Jason: So yeah, so that’s where Chris and I get a lot of negative keyword ideas, through the Google Search. So, the next place, Chris, is, if you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know where you’re going.
Chris: Oh, wonderfully said.
Jason: Well, wow for me, wow for me. So, we’re talking about the previous history; we’re talking about the agency that managed the account before; we’re talking about a business owner taking over an account and cleaning it up; we’re talking about a new employee coming in for an employee who quit. There’s a ton of data, Chris, in the Search Terms Report.
Well, the biggest mistake people make is they don’t look far back enough.
Chris: Yeah, even if you’re starting a new campaign… Let’s say you’re saying you know, this other one was not successful. You know, they had really, you know, it was completely the wrong kind of stuff that we wanted. There is still data that is worth hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, depending on how much you’ve spent. That data in there is incredibly valuable. And there will be Search Queries that will be real gold nuggets, and little [inaudible 14:27] and as well that are negative terms.
So you want to look for those gold nuggets and those little [inaudible 14:34] and figure out which ones you should add and block in your new campaigns. So yeah, previous history I think is very important, because, you know, it can really make a difference. Even if you didn’t get what you wanted out of it, you can still avoid making those same mistakes.
Jason: Right, and just speaking about the previous history, Chris, I took over like, a home foundation company this week from another agency, and they only do business in one state.
Chris: Oh-oh.
Jason: And they had spent, like, I think like 5000 dollars from other states because they didn’t have that Advance Location things set on. .
Chris: Goodness.
Jason: So you can find a lot of stuff in the history. And even the campaigns that are turned off and… There’s just a ton of stuff in there. So the next place, Chris, is our home away from home – the Keyword Planner, unless you’ve been on the fast…
Chris: …home away from home.
Jason: Unless you’re doing the “Fastest way to build an AdWords Campaign,” which we were talking about last episode, we don’t even need…
Chris: Episode 26
Jason: Yeah, Episode 26, where you don’t even need the Keyword Planner. But if you go into the keyword planner and do a keyword research, Chris, it is a fantastic resource to not only get keywords but to get negative keyword ideas. And so I want you to walk us through our example here of our non… Oh, if anyone’s disappointed here, let me just thumb up for Chris that I wanted to a moving company example.
Chris: [Laughter]
Jason: I wanted to talk about moving…
Chris: Oh gosh [Laughter]!
Jason: … for the 6000th time.
Chris: We get it, we get it! You’re the “Moving“ AdWords professional, we get it.
Jason: I might have used this phrase every day, Chris; I might have taught a mover that there’s not a person breathing on this earth that knows more about moving company business and AdWords than I.
Chris: Yeah, __.
Jason: I might have said that. But we’re sick of the ‘Moving’ example. So Chris asked me to do a new one, and the first thing that came to mind was a big hunky guy doing our personal training. So I typed in “Personal Trainer,” and Chris, we were set on Los Angeles here, and we were both looking at it. Why don’t you just go through some of the examples here of, like, horrible words you would never want to waste budget on if you’re trying to advertise your personal training business?
Chris: Yeah, personal training business… This is a local gym that you’ve set up in, right? This is a local business. So first, “Certified Trainer,” that’s a possibility, but quickly, you know, right below that, we see things like “Certifications,” right? “Certification to Become a Personal Trainer” Immediately a negative keyword – bad idea. “Online Personal Training” – nope, you know, you don’t provide that. This is a local gym; immediately the word “Online” is something that you would want to avoid.
Jason: Right.
Chris: “Equipment,” right? So, one looking to may be start off their own business or you know, just buy the equipment themselves, “Personal Training Equipment” – nope, not interested in that; you’re interested in them coming to your gym, right? I mean, these are things that they may not specifically say it, but based on these extra little terms inside their keyword, you know that they are not in the right purchasing mind to actually purchase a personal training session at your location.
Jason: Yeah, it’s not what they’re interested in and you‘ve got to think like a Search user. Chris, I went to page three now, or page two, and I’m seeing some more. “In-Home Personal Training” – if you don’t do in “Home Personal Training”, you would want to add the word “Home” or “In-Home” as a negative keyword. “Train to be a Personal Trainer’ – that’s a confusing one because it’s got “Train” in there twice, but if you’re training to be a personal trainer, you’re not wanting to hire a personal trainer; so you want to block that out. Just looking for a few more here…
Chris: And one thing I see is, “Boot camp.”
Jason: Yeah, I was just looking at that, yeah.
Chris: Yeah, you know, “Boot camp”… I mean, while it may be someone who would be interested in personal training, I can tell you that boot camp price point is going to be a whole lot less than a personal trainer. Personal trainers will cost a lot of money; hundreds and hundreds of dollars for, you know, a bunch of sessions.
Jason: Right.
Chris: Boot camp is designed for a big group of people to come and meet and it’s a whole lot more less expensive because you share your personal trainer across, you know, 15 different people.
Jason: Right.
Chris: So I would contest that “Boot camp” is probably a bad idea, because this is someone that’s looking for a lot lower price point simply from the fact that they’re searching for a boot camp.
Jason: I’d agree with that, Chris, and you know, one of the most common negative keywords I add that I don’t see a lot of other people adding, are the words “cheap” and “affordable” because if you have a thousand dollars to spend, and you can spend a thousand of it on people not including the word “cheap” or “affordable,” why show your ads to people who’re going to be very price sensitive? So I see one here called “Personal Training Packages” – so maybe that’s people looking for deals.
Another one, Chris, and you really… as an advertiser using AdWords, you have to retrain your brain and you have to think outside the box, and I’ll give you an example, Chris. Let’s say we’re back to the creepy, single Jason days before I had my beautiful girlfriend that I have now. And let’s say I’m going online and I’ve got bad intentions of wanting to get a personal trainer and may be turn her into a lover one day, because I’m, creepy, single Jason. I see…
Chris: [Laughter] Right, okay. You’re painting a very good picture for us.
Jason: Well, we’re talking fiction here, you know, it’s like thinking outside the box; I would never do this. So someone, maybe creepy, single Jason, might search “Female Personal Trainer,” because I’m seeing that here in the Keyword Planner. So, if I’m a male personal trainer, I don’t want to show up on any personal trainer searches that include the word “female” where someone is looking for exclusively female personal trainers…
Chris: Right.
Jason…because they’re never going to hire me because I’m a male. So you really have to think outside the box and I can guarantee you, Chris, if someone’s a personal trainer, and they’ve never used AdWords before, they’re not going to be thinking about blocking the word “female.”
Chris: And they’re not going to be thinking about blocking things like “video,” “picture,” “pics,” “slogans” or, you know, “quotes” or things like that. There’s a lot of things that people just search for…
Jason: Taxes, taxes…
Chris: Yeah, I mean, a lot of things like that, because what you’re probably going to end up choosing is you’re going to choose “personal trainer” as a phrase-match keyword, right? So that means you can get the word “picture,” you can get the word “video,” you can get the word, you know, “tax,” “tax provider,” something like that, you know, that’s very possible.
Jason: Right, so you’re not going to come up with these negative keyword ideas especially if you’re new to AdWords unless you use the Keyword Planner and really dig in. And not only use it for finding keywords but really, actually using it to try to find negative keywords. So another thing, Chris, one more thing about the Keyword Planner is you can sort… What I like to do is I like to, when I’m all done, with the last step, I like to do is, sort by volume, and look at the highest volume terms just to make sure I catch any high volume words that I would want to add as negative keywords that I didn’t catch throughout the process sorting by relevancy.
Chris: Mm, okay.
Jason: Moving on to our next topic or way of finding negative keywords.
Chris: Yes.
Jason: You can bank them. You can come with a list of negative keywords that you go to over and over on every account; words like “video,” “YouTube,” “free,” “salary,” “pricing,” you can save those..
Chris: These are often reused across…
Jason: Right, they’re apply to almost every single campaign. The word ‘software’ is another one. So Chris, you have a great resource that we’re going to put in our show notes paidsearchpodcast.com/27 and I want you to tell people about that list and how you use it.
Chris: Yeah, so there is a shared Google Doc spreadsheet that has…400… last time I looked, 400 to 500 keywords on there that are across many different topics; so there’s a general category, and then there’s sub-categories going into tech and real estate and health care and retail, all these about…
Jason: They have one about sex too.
Chris: Yeah, I was going to skip that one, but thanks for bringing that up [Laughter], creepy Jason. But, you know, that’s… I use this all the time… [Laughter] Jason’s making eyes at me, so I completely lost my concentration at that point.
Jason: You use it all the time…?
Chris: Yeah, I use it all the time. This is something I… I don’t necessarily use all, you know, one thousand keywords that they have suggested here, I’ll be a little more careful because that’s one thing we have not talked about yet is, Jason, you can wreck your campaign and basically destroy potential qualified clicks by having too many negative keywords. So you know, I want to say don’t just grab everything that we’re talking about here, you know, this massive list, because there’s a lot.
You need to be careful about what you’re choosing. A lot of these are really good, but do scan these words and make sure they don’t explicitly exclude some things that might be valuable to you.
Now, we’ll tell you something that has not always been available and that now is, is Google will actually tell you that certain negative keywords are blocking your… for lack of a better term, positive keywords, your matching keywords. That’s not always been something that Google has alluded to to before, so that’s a nice little feature, so if you do end up making a mistake, Google will tell you, “Hey, the keyword…”
Jason: [Inaudible 24:38]
Chris: Yeah, you’ll have the word “Car,” but maybe you have a keyword that’s “Car Sales.” Google will say, “Hey, the word ‘Car’ is blocking ‘Car Sales,’” and you can remove that keyword automatically by just clicking a button, so, great stuff. But this list is compiled by someone else, it was not compiled by us; it’s just a free resource that’s out there that someone has generously shared with the world.
Jason: And now we’re sharing it with all you seeking …. We’ll link to that on the show notes, so you guys can check it out. Now the next way, Chris, is something that nerds don’t like to do, but it’s about talk – getting out there, talking to people, living your life…
Chris: Social.
Jason: Being social, talking , being interested in other people, small talk, conversing, water cooler talk, that Chris does not do.
Chris: It’s exhausting me just hearing all this.
Jason: Yeah, so it’s not for everyone, but when you’re out there, living your life, in real life, have that negative keyword radar up. And so, if you’ve got a plumber out to your house, and you happen to manage plumbing campaigns, if he’s talking about his business and he mentions some weird word for a tool… Just think, may be there’s something called the skirt or something that people search for. Then you can show up on other things when someone’s searching for that plumbing tool or whatever.
So there’s just a whole lot you can learn by talking to people, reading through people’s websites, learning about different industries. And not only that, but if you’re advertising for yourself, talk to yourself, write down a list of things you don’t want to show up on. Ask your secretary what kind of calls she gets that annoy her, that aren’t people looking for the business…
Chris: Oh, good one. I like that.
Jason: …yeah, what’s frustrating here and see if you can come up with ideas, because you’re not going to get everything from the Keyword Planner or Google Searches initially. And Chris, you’ve got another great way to kind of play defence before you even run a campaign, and that’s with your ad copy…
Chris: Right.
Jason…to kind of turn off people searching for different kinds of services or products or whatever.
Chris: So negative keywords are designed to avoid people that do not qualify to see your product, right?
You know that they’re probably not interested in it based on the way that they’re searching. Another way to avoid unwanted clicks is to be upfront in your ad copy, okay?
If you sell a service that is surprisingly high-priced, you know… Typically, a limo service might be, you know, let’s say a hundred dollars for…
Jason: High-priced for low class people.
Chris: Yes… Well, okay… Yeah, it might be a hundred dollars for one way, one evening trip. But your limo is, you know, on monster tyres…
Jason: And a hummer.
Chris: And it’s got this just amazing, ridiculous paint job and it’s just over the top, and yours is a thousand dollars a night, you know, it’s in a minimum of this much. You need to put those points in your ad copy. I know you may think that, “I want people to call me, I want people to click”. No, you don’t. No, you don’t, because if they are shocked by a thousand dollar price point, they are then going to click your ad, call you on the phone, waste your time until you get to that price point and they are going to say, “What? Are you crazy?”, and then you’ve lost time and money, right?
Jason: Right.
Chris: I mean, it’s… I think it makes a lot of sense. I get a lot of push back from some of our clients who say, “We can’t put our prices in the ad, you know. Are you crazy? Nobody does that.” Well, I’m just trying to be smart Joe, just trying to be smart. Joe is a fictional person. If I have any clients named Joe, I am not talking to you, Joe, okay?
Jason: Right. I totally agree with you Chris, and one thing I will say is that men make plans and God less. Because sometimes…
Chris: Ah, grand.
Jason: …because sometimes you put that kind of defensive stuff in your ad copy and these lunatics just search and click, search and click, search and click, and you get the calls anyway, so…
Chris: Yeah, that’s true.
Jason: But you probably get less if you play defence like this. So Chris, as we close off the show here, we can go through a couple of our… just our favourite examples that always stick with us, that we think about from time to time, and we can show you just how weird some of the searches are in terms of what you can show up on, and how you, on a regular basis, need to be reviewing that Search Terms Report to catch things like this. So Chris, what is this “homework” example with this company?
Chris: Yeah, so I had a client that was in the chemistry business; they sold chemicals of different types. So a lot of their keywords were very specific about different chemicals, and compounds, and stuff like that. So what was happening is, they would get what I called “homework” traffic. They would get people searching for this chemical name, and then a lot of different terms afterwards like, you know, “structure,” or you know details about that certain chemical.
Jason: I do math… how do I get off the…
Chris: Right. No, not exactly. But they would get ton of these clicks. So what I had to do was add every question term to their campaign. I’ve never had to do this before, it was really interesting. It was a big risk and it ended up working out really well; they got a whole lot better traffic. I basically had to add keywords like “What is,” “How to,” “Why,” or you know, any type of question terminology I had to add as a negative keyword. Suddenly all the qualified clicks started coming to the top, I started seeing a whole lot better search queries, Click Through Rate improved and their total spend needed or their Search Impression Share improved dramatically, because now we got a whole lot less of the unwanted stuff showing up and the campaign improved.
Jason: Was it phrase-match keywords triggering all that stuff?
Chris: No, they were modified broad. Some were modified broads, some were phrase. Definitely not, definitely not exact, it was not exact, but it was modified broad and phrase match.
Jason: Yeah, sometimes Chris, I manage a campaign, you know… For three months I’ll just keep adding all these different “How to,” “What were,” “What does,” or whatever, negative keywords with, like, little longer phrases and then eventually, I just throw my hands up and say, “You know what? We’re done with the word ‘Who’!” Or, “We are done with the word ‘What’ or ‘How’” but I I’m nervous always because like I don’t want to block too much, but it’s like, those words really, you can do a lot of good by just getting rid of them and just seeing what happens when your volume goes down but the quality goes way up.
So my favourite example, Chris… It is from the moving business, but it’s a funny one. A lot of people don’t know this but I’ve seen it on multiple moving campaigns. You will show up on weird searches like “Moving on Lyrics,” “Moving on Quotes,” and it’s like, women or men who have been broken up with and they’re trying to move on from that relationship.
So why did someone searching that click on a moving company ad which says “Local Professional Moving”? I don’t know, but they do. It must be the tears in their eyes or the Cheeto puffs on their fingers making them click the wrong spot. But they’re heartbroken, they’re hungry, they’re eating, they’re crying, they’re watching at the Hallmark Channel, and then they click on our ad and waste our money, so… You got to add those negatives.
Chris: I think clicks like that tell me that the literacy rates in the United States is a lot lower than the percentages that the Government tells us. I think half the people, that they say can read, really can’t, because I… We should not get clicks that we get, you know, it’s a strange [inaudible 33:03]
Jason: Probably a ….Chris, is taking a Paid Search Podcast test budget for fun, and actually advertising on those words, but for like, totally different businesses. [Laughter] I’m just seeing what kind of…
Chris: Yes. Yeah.
Jason: Cheeto puffed, heartbroken people, you can click on them.
Chris: Yeah, I’ll let you fund that.
Jason: I’ve been known to burn money, so… By the way, everyone have a webcam now, so…
Jason: He looks, he looks… I can see the pores in his white, pasty skin now. It’s so much better; you guys are really missing out. So be sure and check out our next update on our YouTube channel coming up soon.
Jason: Yeah, check me out on the webcam.
Chris: You can see him in high-definition now. It’s glorious!
Jason: Yeah. So everyone thanks for listening, thanks for sharing. The show notes will be on paidsearchpodcast.com/27 and you can access that large negative keywords list that that company saves out there. Thanks for listening.
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