Paid search can be your business’ best friend or your worst enemy, depending on how your campaigns are managed.
There are many tools available in adwords and paid search techniques that you can use to manage your spend effectively. Location targeting can prevent clicks from geographic locations your business doesn’t serve, max and manual bidding allow you to ensure you don’t bid over what you deem a keyword to be worth, and breaking keywords down by match type allow you to define the specificity of keywords triggering your ads.
These are all great tools and techniques, but the one thing they can’t do is prevent irrelevant search queries making your ad appear. Personally, this is a pet hate of mine and I wonder what goes through the heads of some Google users when I can see they have searched “Boris Johnson speech at Olympics”, but they have clicked on a “speech analytics” ad. Even more frustrating is when your ads generate clicks from users search for “free website analytics software” and they click on your “speech analytics” ad, even though the ad copy clearly states your offering.
So, how can you prevent this irrelevant search traffic?
The answer is simple, negative keywords.
Negative keywords are undoubtedly one of the most effective and underused tools in paid search. In a nutshell, negative keywords are keywords that you put in our campaign that will prevent your ads from appearing. For example, if I didn’t want my ads to appear to people that are search for “free speech analytics software” because my software isn’t free I would add “free” as a negative keyword.
Ideally, you will add your list of negative keywords when the campaign is built, this way your will ensure you’re your budget is spent effectively from the outset. Furthermore, management of negative keywords throughout the life of the campaign is crucial. Filtering through the search query report is a great way to determine what negative keywords you want to add, there may have been some you forgot to add at the beginning that rear their ugly heads, or there may be keywords that you never even considered for negatives spending your budget.
Although negative keyword management is more time consuming than setting location targeting or a max CPC on your campaign, if done properly you will see huge benefits.
If you’re still struggling to get the most out of your PPC campaign then complete the form on the right or call us for a free PPC evaluation.
