Negatives help you increase your quality score in Google, but more importantly, help you lower costs by keeping your ads from being shown to or clicked on by untargeted searchers. The smaller the client, the more important lowering costs become, but the same principles can be used for effectively managing generic and high volume terms for any client.
Many SEM professionals just look at their tracking logs or at keyword lists and throw together broad matched negatives for keywords that haven’t converted or aren’t related to their product. While this is an effective tactic to improve the results of your campaign, there are more granular methods to get the most out of the advertising dollars you are spending.
Match Types
Using phrase or exact matched negatives can help you show up for a broad set of searches while keeping your ad from showing up when you don’t want it to. These should be used in the same way that you would use different match types for any other campaign. If you have the keywords chocolate and milk chocolate in the same adgroup and you only sell chocolates, you may consider having the keyword “chocolate milk” as a phrase matched negative keyword. This will keep you from showing up for many searches that are irrelevant to your product and will allow you to have greater control of who you are messaging.
Keyword Selection & Placement
Negative keyword selection and placement is also important. Different types of keywords require a different set of negatives. Using campaign negatives allow you to easily set negatives for all your adgroups, but you must remember that each set of keywords is addressing the searcher in a different way. Sometimes using “free” as a negative is a good idea, other times, leaving it out will still bring in orders. In a similar scenario, just because you have “widget” as a keyword in your account doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a negative somewhere else in your account.
Negatives allow you to have greater control over your account. They are a great way to improve results and to allow you to stay competitive in the growing arena of advertisers online. Using negatives effectively will help give you and even larger edge over your
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