How to EFFECTIVELY add negative keywords
Negative keywords are one of the most powerful ways to increase the CTR (and so your position) on AdWords for broad and phrase keywords.
Unfortunately there is not much documentation about how to use them in an effective way.
Let’s see the different levels of understanding of negative keywords form beginner to advanced:
- Don’t understand negatives at all, they just don’t add them
- Add obvious negatives like “free” to their campaigns
- Check their webserver logs or analytics software and look at exact search queries, then add irrelevant words to negatives
However even the 3rd level of understanding is really missing the most important thing!
There is an important distinction to make in negatives:
- Negatives that don’t make the sale
- Negatives that don’t get the click
Negatives that don’t make the sale are the ones that you can get from analytics - when you get the clicks but those clicks don’t make sales: by adding those negatives you’ll increase your conversion rate but not necessarily your CTR.
Negatives that don’t make the click are like a hidden disease: some people search but never click, so you have no way to know that these impressions happen and so to put them as negative. Reason being that with an analytics software you can track the search query that generated a click but there is no way to know which search query generated an impression that never got a click.
Note: Even if an impression doesn’t make the click it’s costing you money because it lowers your CTR
One way I found to help in this task is to write an advert that is as generic as possible for your topic: what will happen is that some people will click on it as they find it somewhat relevant no matter what they search.
Example if you write “Buy” in your advert the chances of someone that had the word “Free” in this search query clicking is very low, so you may simply never realize that anyone is searching “Free” and put it as negative - however if the advert is completely generic you have more chances to get a click from both “free” and “buy”.
Of course this generic ad is just a first phase of your campaign to learn negatives, after that you’ll try targeted ad variations to improve your CTR and conversion rate.
