Managing Negative Keywords in Paid Search Campaigns

Paid search campaigns are a powerful tool for businesses to promote their brand, products, and services. However, without proper management, they can become inefficient and costly. One important aspect of optimizing paid search campaigns is the strategic use and management of negative keywords. Read on to learn more about what negative keywords are and why they are important, and insights on identifying, implementing, and optimizing negative keywords in your campaigns.

Basics of Negative Keywords

Paid search campaigns involve bidding on keywords to display ads to relevant audiences. Positive keywords are search terms for which you want your ads to appear. On the other hand, negative keywords are those you want to exclude. Equally important as positive keywords, negative keywords are terms that, when present in a search query, prevent an ad from being shown.

Negative keywords play a pivotal role in shaping the success of paid search campaigns and offer several benefits such as:

• Narrowing the target audience: By excluding irrelevant terms, you can narrow down your audience to those most likely to convert.
• Fewer wasted clicks: Avoiding clicks from audiences unlikely to engage with your content saves money and increases your return on investment (ROI).
• Driving relevant, high–quality content: Focusing on your target audience improves the quality of traffic directed to your landing pages.
• Positive impact on click-through and conversion rates: By ensuring your ads are shown to the most interested users, you increase click-through rates (CTR) and conversions.
• Saving money: By having fewer wasted clicks and increased conversions, you’ll save money.

Examples of Negative Keywords

Some examples of negative keywords you may want to include in your campaigns include:

• “Free”: If you sell a product or service and don’t offer anything free, you might add “free” as a negative keyword. This will help you avoid attracting users only looking for freebies.
• “Cheap”: Similar to free, adding “cheap” as a negative keyword can help you avoid users only looking for low-cost options. This is especially relevant if your product or service is not positioned as a budget-friendly offering.
• “Jobs”: If you’re running a campaign for a product or service and want to exclude people looking for job opportunities related to that product or service, you might add this as a negative keyword.
• “Reviews”: Add this keywords if you sell a product or service and don’t want to attract users looking for reviews instead of purchasing.

Identifying Relevant Negative Keywords

Effective negative keyword management starts with thorough keyword research. Keep in mind that it’s not just about the keywords you want to target, but also identifying what you want to exclude.

Regularly conduct manual searches on popular search engines and social media for keywords related to your business. You can also use tools such as:

• Google Autocomplete: Google Autocomplete is an algorithm developed by Google to help you find the best matching phrases to a main seed keyword. This function provides suggestions for users while typing their query to the search form and can help you identify both positive and negative keywords.
• Google Keyword Planner: This tool helps you research for keywords for your search campaign. It can help you discover new keywords related to your products and services as well as see estimates of the searches they receive and the costs to target them.

Once you identify appropriate positive and negative keywords, you’ll next want to analyze search terms and user intent. Consider click potential, post-click scenarios, and search intent. Evaluate whether a person searching for a specific term is likely to click on your ad and consider what might happen after a user clicks on your ad and whether it aligns with your goals. Ensure the search intent matches your target audience.

Implementing Negative Keywords into Paid Search Campaigns

Adding negative keywords to your paid search campaigns helps you refine your audience and improve campaign performance. To do so (at a high level):

1. Sign into your Google Ads account: Go to ads.google.com and sign in.
2. Navigate to your campaign settings: Click on the “Campaigns” tab to view your campaigns; select the campaign that you want to add negative keywords to.
3. Access the negative keywords section: Within the campaign, click on the “Keywords” tab, then click the “Navigate keywords” sub-tab.
4. Add negative keywords: Click the blue “plus” button to add a new negative keyword. Add the keyword(s) you want and choose the match type (broad, phrase, or exact match).
   • Broad match: Your ad won’t show if the search query contains all the terms in your negative keyword.
   • Phrase match: Your ad won’t show if the search query contains the exact phrase you’ve specified, even if it includes additional words before or after the phrase.
   • Exact match: This prevents your ad from showing only when the search query exactly matches your negative keyword, with no additional words before, after, or in between.
5. Choose the level: You can add keywords at the campaign or ad group level. Adding at the campaign level will apply to all ad groups within the campaign, while adding to the ad group level will only apply them to the specified ad group.

Best Practices for Implementing Negative Keywords

Implementing negative keywords into your paid search campaign requires careful planning and management. Some best practices and tips to help you effectively implement and optimize your negative keyword strategy include:

• Run regular search query reports: Regularly review your search query reports to identify new negative keyword opportunities. Look for irrelevant search terms triggering your ads and add them as negative keywords to improve targeting.
• Don’t add too many at once: Adding too many negative keywords at the same time can impact your campaign performance. Start with a controlled number and monitor their impact before adding more.
• Organize your negative keyword lists: Organize your negative keywords into lists based on relevance to different ad groups or campaigns. This can make it easier to manage and adjust your strategy over time.
• Use account-wide negatives: Consider using account-wide negative keywords for terms that are universally irrelevant to your business. This can help save you time by applying these negatives across all campaigns.
• Work with a digital marketing service: Considering the importance of managing your paid ads properly and without wasting money, it’s best to work with a digital marketing firm. They can create and manage your ads, saving you time and ensuring you are reaching the right audience.

Monitoring and Optimizing Negative Keywords

Monitoring and optimizing your negative keywords are essential for maintaining the effectiveness of your paid search campaigns. Review your campaign performance metrics weekly or bi-weekly. These include click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost per acquisition (CPA). Identify any patterns or trends in your campaign performance that may indicate the need for adjustments to your negative keyword list.

You can use tools such as Google Ads to gain these insights. Look for improvements in CTR, reduction in irrelevant clicks, and increases in conversion rates after implementing your negative keywords.

To optimize, you can add new negative keywords based on search query reports and performance data. You can then adjust match types for existing negative keywords. If certain negative keywords are not improving performance, you can consider removing them to avoid unnecessarily restricting your ad’s reach.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Some common mistakes to avoid in your campaigns include:

• Overlooking importance of negative keywords: Understand the consequences of neglecting negative keyword management and how it can hurt your budget and campaign performance.
• Failing to update regularly: There are risks associated with infrequent updates. These include decreased CTR, decreased conversions, and increased CPA. This can then lead to spending more money than you should for fewer leads and sales.
• Relying solely on broad match keywords: Explore broad, phrase, and exact match keywords. Learn how optimizing these can positively impact your campaigns performance. Keeping match too broad can seriously limit when your ad appears and you may miss out on clicks.

Conclusion

Negative keyword management and optimization is critical for sustained success in paid search campaigns. It’s important to stay informed on trends, adapt to changes, and prioritize the ongoing refinement of your negative keyword strategy.

Whether you need guidance on an existing campaign or implementation of new campaigns, Dragonfly Digital Marketing can be your partner. We are an experienced agency providing clients with a wide range of digital marketing solutions, including paid search advertising services. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business make the most out of its paid search strategy.