When you are running a paid online advertising campaign in Google Ads, sometimes it can feel like a gamble with your budget. However, as you learn more and more about the platform you will see there are various ways to refine your account, ad groups, and more to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck.
So you may ask yourself, is there an easy way to improve my PPC campaign?
The Answer: Negative Keywords
If you didn’t already know, you can actually denote certain terms you wish not to show up during a search. These are called negative keywords.
We often evaluate our search terms to see what types of queries lead to clicks, and analyze if they lead to a conversion, if they are relevant to our services, and how much they cost per click.
Where You Can Apply Negative Keywords
There are three different areas you can add negative keywords, depending on the specificity of the terms. These include:
- Ad group level – To get specific in your paid marketing, at this level you can decide whether you want or don’t want specific keywords to apply to your individual ad groups in your campaigns.
- Campaign level – If you have campaigns that are relatively similar, you may be getting terms in one campaign that are more relevant to another campaign. Adding negative keywords here can help refine your list even more.
- Account level – You can also have a specified negative keyword list that allows you to add terms you do not wish to show at any time for any campaign.
Terms to Consider Adding
Depending on the type of products or services you are marketing, there are some broad terms that you can consider applying to your account-wide negative keywords list, especially if you are using broad match or broad match modifier keywords:
- Jobs
- Training
- Courses
- Free
- Tools
- Cheap
- News
- Freelancer
- YouTube
- And more
A lot of these terms will likely not bring in relevant or quality clicks, which can help you save some money to help produce better results in the long run.
And if you want to get extremely specific, you could remove terms that are more relevant to someone in a research phase versus a buying mode. So question-like terms such as “how,” “what,” “when,” “why,” or “who” can all probably go.
Pro Tip: It might be a good idea to negative out some of your competitors’ names as well, since when people are searching for a specific brand they are likely not interested in exploring other options.
Different Ways to Add Negative Terms
Just like you can add various keyword types to your ads, you can also do the same to your negatives:
- Broad (keyword)
- Broad match modifier (+keyword)
- Exact match ([keyword])
- Phase match (“keyword”)
Learn More About Running PPC Campaigns
We have plenty of other helpful blog posts much like this one that you can read to help you along the way:
