Improve your Search for Relevant Traffic with Negative Keywords

I’ve always thought it to be romantic, as a search marketer I am constantly searching for ways for searchers to find me.  Part of finding the golden nugget is often trying to weed out the bad eggs. Even with finding long tail terms and 2-3 word terms we sometimes have to rely on board terms to drive traffic to our sites. In many cases our searcher may not be a proficient internet user or they just might not be educated on the subject.  This causes an inflating in our impressions and click-thru rates, as well as a decrease average time on site and conversions. How can we ensure the traffic we are attracting and essentially paying to visitor our sites are relevant to our specific needs?  One method of “pre-screening” our audience is do not invite them to view your ads. How? By adding Negative Keywords to your campaigns, we not only reduce the unwanted clicks but it also increases the CTR and the Quality Score and allows you to even save money.

Finding Negative Keywords:

Within your Google Adwords account, run a Search Query Report. My suggestion is to go back about 30 days depending on the number of impressions and click-thrus for this account. Download the report into Excel and sort through the ‘Search Query’ column to identify queries that do not pertain to your site. For example, say you are a used car dealer. And one of your terms is ‘used cars’, I understand this is a pretty broad terms but let’s run with it. A few irrelevant queries you may found on your Search Query Report might be, ‘Used Car Reports’, ‘Used Car Repairs’, ‘Used Car Parts ‘, ‘Used Cars to Avoid’ and the list goes on.  Once you have a nice list of negative terms, use the Google Keyword Tool to identify even more negative terms and adding them to your campaigns.

A few more suggestions to find potential negative terms:

• Do a Google Search for your terms and see what pops up in the result pages.
• Try Google Suggest (a recent grad of Google Labs) to identify other possibilities of negative. (This is also a good practice to identify targeted terms to add to your campaign.)
• Review web analytic keyword reports.