If you are running a paid advertising campaign, it’s crucial to ensure that you target the right audience with the right keywords. However, it’s equally important to include negative keywords in your strategy. Negative keywords are a way to exclude your ads from showing up for searches that are irrelevant to your product, which can help you in several ways. In this post, we’ll discuss three reasons why negative keywords are important to include in your paid advertising strategy.

By the end of this quick guide, you’ll understand:

• What are negative keywords?
• Why negative keywords are essential to your PPC campaigns?
• Benefits of adding Negative Keywords to your add
• How to find negative keywords and put them to work
• How to create a negative keyword list.
• Conclusion

What are negative keywords?

Negative keywords are a type of keyword used in paid search advertising campaigns. They are words or phrases that you choose not to target with your ads. By excluding these keywords, you can prevent your ads from being shown to users who are searching for something that is not relevant to your product or service. This can help you save money and improve the efficiency of your advertising campaigns.

Why negative keywords are essential to your PPC campaign

It’s essential to not only target keywords that will put your ads in front of the desired audience, but you also want to prevent irrelevant search queries from triggering ads, thus saving money and increasing click-through rate. They can be added at the account, campaign, or ad group level, and can be of the broad, phrase, or exact match types. The point of a paid ad campaign is to raise brand awareness and maximize conversions; every dollar counts. If your ads are shown to an indifferent audience that won’t buy from you, then this exposure and clicks from this crowd will be a waste. Wasted clicks are costly.

The Benefits of Using Negative Keywords in Your PPC Campaigns

Using negative keywords, keyword filtering, and keyword optimization can help ensure that your ads are reaching the right audience and showing up for relevant searches. By leveraging these strategies, businesses can save time and money while increasing their visibility online. Better targeting can put your ad in front of interested users and increase your return on investment (ROI). Let’s look at a great advantage.

Avoid Wasting Ad Spend

One of the significant benefits of including negative keywords in your campaign is that it helps you avoid wasting ad spending on irrelevant clicks. For example, if you’re selling jewelry keychain holders, adding “keychain holder” as a keyword in your campaign could still make it appear when people search for “custom keychain holders.” To stop this from happening, just add “custom” to your list of negative keywords. That way, your ad won’t show up for irrelevant searches. You won’t end up wasting any money on clicks that won’t convert into sales. You can maximize your budget and focus on targeting people who are more likely to purchase your product.

Improve Ad Relevance

Another advantage of using negative keywords is that it helps improve the relevance of your ads. Google’s algorithm rewards ads that are relevant to the searcher’s intent with higher ad rankings and lower costs per click. By excluding irrelevant searches with negative keywords, you can increase the relevance of your ads and improve your ad performance. This way, you can attract potential customers who are more likely to click on your ad and eventually make a purchase.

Increase Click-Through Rates

By using negative keywords in your campaign, you can also increase your click-through rates (CTRs). This is because your ads will only show up for searches that are relevant to your product or service. When your ads are more relevant, people are more likely to click on them, leading to more clicks and potentially more conversions with the same ad spend. This way, you can make the most out of your advertising budget and get better results for your business.

More advantages to adding negative keywords

Adding negative keywords to your PPC campaigns can help you target the right audience and avoid wasted spend on irrelevant searches. By creating a negative keyword list, you can quickly and efficiently exclude search terms and ensure that your budget is spent on profitable searches. Better targeting can lead to higher CTR and ROI, while a lack of negative keywords can result in wasted impressions or clicks and a decline in CTR.

Best Practices. How to create your list of negative keywords.

Negative keywords are key for a successful SEM strategy; they help target relevant audiences. A negative keywords list is a collection of words/phrases that exclude ads from irrelevant searches, ensuring the budget is spent on profitable searches.

Create a negative keyword list to quickly, and efficiently create multiple campaigns with broad & phrase-match keywords.

Agree better targeting puts ads in front of more interested users and increases ROI. Already have certain search terms in mind to exclude from campaigns to focus on keywords that matter.

Create a negative keyword list to save time adding the same terms to future campaigns.

Calculate your CTR

To identify which keywords you should exclude, you need to be able to measure when impressions turn into clicks. And you measure what works by calculating your click-through-rate CTR. A CTR is basically the percentage of people who actually click on a link or ad compared to the total number of people who see it. Here’s how to calculate it:

Click-through rate = (clicks/impressions) x 100.

Why does it matter? You want your ads to be viewed by the most people possible. In digital marketing speak, views are called impressions. The more impressions turn into clicks, the higher your ad’s CTR and vice versa. A high CTR means your campaign was effective in reaching the right demographic.

A lower Click-Through Rate (CTR) will reduce your Quality Score, affecting your Ad Rank and increasing the cost of each click.

In other words, a declining CTR—as a result of your ad matching to irrelevant queries—signals to Google that your ad isn’t terribly relevant or helpful to the people you’re trying to reach. As such, you’re charged more money for visibility in the paid search results.

Negative keywords are super important because they keep your ads away from irrelevant searches & help prevent any unnecessary CPC rises.

Two methods to find negative keywords

Ok— Now that we’ve stressed the importance of adding negative keywords to your paid ad campaigns, So, how do you narrow down the negative keywords to add to your Google Ads account? You have 2 main options here: reactive and proactive. Neither will disappoint and both can bring you desired outcomes. Let’s check them out.

The reactive approach to finding & adding negative keywords

So, when it comes to the reactive approach in Google Ads, you basically have to sift through the search queries in the Keywords tab. Don’t worry, it’s not too hard! You’ll be able to see the search terms, match type, and whether they’re added or excluded. If you find any irrelevant search queries, you can add them as negative keywords. Just select “Add as Negative Keyword” from the options screen. But, if you want to take a more data-driven approach, you can filter the search terms report based on click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost-per-action to find the best negative keywords to add.

The proactive approach and adding negative keywords

The proactive approach, on the other hand, is a little more involved but can also give you great results. There are a few different methods you can use, but one popular one is to brainstorm with your team to come up with negative keywords that might be relevant to your business. This can include things like brand names you don’t want to show up for or any irrelevant terms you can think of. Then, you can add those negative keywords to your campaign or ad group.

Another option is to use a tool like Google’s Keyword Planner to find negative keywords. Just enter a few relevant keywords and the tool will generate a list of related terms. You can then review the list and add any negative keywords that aren’t relevant to your business.

Remember, adding negative keywords is important because it can help you save money and improve the performance of your ads. By excluding keywords that aren’t relevant to your business, you can focus on the right audience and improve the effectiveness of your ads.

So, whether you choose a reactive or proactive approach, adding negative keywords is a crucial part of any successful Google Ads campaign.

How to add negative keywords to your ad campaign.

When adding negative keywords to your ad campaign, it is important to keep in mind that negative keywords work differently in Display and Video campaigns than they do in search. You can add individual negative keywords to your campaign or ad group, or you can add multiple negative keywords at once. Click-through rate is used in online advertising to measure the effectiveness of a campaign or advertisement.

To add individual negative keywords to your ad groups or campaigns, follow these steps:

1. Select Keywords and Targeting > Keywords, Negative.
2. Click Add a negative keyword and select Ad group negative keyword or Campaign negative keyword.
3. If prompted, select the destination for the new negative keyword and click OK.
4. Enter the negative keyword in the edit panel.

If you want to add multiple negative keywords, you can choose to add either negative keywords or campaign negative keywords. Follow these steps:

1. Select Keywords and Targeting > Keywords, Negative.
2. Click Make multiple changes.
3. Select My data includes columns for campaigns and/or ad groups or Use selected destinations.

• If you select Use selected destinations, select Add as campaign-level negative keywords or Add as ad group-level negative keywords.

1. Type or paste your negative keywords in the grid.
2. Click Process.
3. The Make multiple changes tool will display the number of changes made. Click Finish and review changes.
4. Review your pending changes. To add the pending changes to your account, click Keep. To undo your changes, click Reject.

Remember that adding negative keywords can help you reduce costs and improve click-through-rate. By excluding keywords that are not relevant to your ad campaign, you can focus on the right audience and improve the effectiveness of your ads.

Conclusion

In conclusion, negative keywords are an essential part of any paid advertising strategy. By avoiding wasted ad spend, improving ad relevance, and increasing click-through rates, negative keywords can help you get more out of your advertising campaigns. By taking the time to research and include negative keywords, you can improve the performance of your paid advertising and get better results for your business.