Almost every pay-per-click advertising campaign has room for optimization. Today, let’s focus on one simple way to save money with your Google AdWords campaigns: adding negative keywords. A negative keyword prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase.
For instance, it’s incredibly important to list negative keywords for my clients who are professional speakers. Otherwise, our ads would display for searches such as “Sony speakers for sale,” or “Public speaking tips.”
How to Add Negative Keywords to Your Google AdWords Campaigns
First, you’ll need to identify which keywords result in undesirable clicks to your ads. Fortunately, Google has a tool for that. In the Keywords tab, look at the Search Terms sub-tab, shown below:
Google describes this report as follows:
“Learn how customers are finding your ad. With the Search terms report, you can see the actual searches people entered on Google Search and other Search Network sites that triggered your ad and led to a click. Depending on your keyword match types, this list might include terms other than exact matches to your keywords.”
When I ran this report for a veterinary hospital, I found a few stray clicks from searches for things like “cat declawing” and “ear cropping” – services my client definitely doesn’t provide! Also, several searches indicated clicks that might not results in optimal clients, such as “free vet clinic.” And there was a weird “def leppard” result. (Sometimes running this report can be really funny– except your advertising budget isn’t laughing.)
To add the negative keywords, click on the Negative Keywords sub tab, then click the big red +KEYWORDS button:
All done! Enjoy your savings.
Suggested Negative Keywords to Get You Started
Different industries usually require different negative keywords, but here are a few general suggestions I use for most of my clients:
- Cheap
- Free
- DIY
- How to
- Learn to
- Profanity and explicit language
Add some negative keywords and watch your AdWords reports to track your results. You should save money and also receive more relevant clicks from potential customers.
