Despite having the word negative in their name, negative keywords help your ad campaigns by only associating your ads with relevant keywords and phrases.
What are Negative Keywords?
Negative keywords are the words and phrases that you do not want your ad campaign to appear online for. When you create a Google Ad campaign, you select the words and terms that you want to be associated with it. An ad for your kid’s clothing store may incorporate words such as ‘newborn’ and ‘back to school’. As you only sell clothes for the younger age groups, you want to ensure that those searching online for adult clothes do not come across your ad, click on it, and then bounce causing a continual dent in your budget. To counteract this, you assign negative keywords that you do not want your ad to appear for, for search terms such as ‘women’s clothes’ or ‘adult sizes’.
How are Negative Keywords Useful?
Alongside their use as touched on above, negative keywords assist in keeping the focus of an ad campaign on the straight and narrow. No doubt your business offers more than one product/service, but when you are looking to promote one singular product/service with your ads you do not want this detracted from. For example, you may be having a sale on children’s winter coats but you are also hiring for employees in your store. Therefore it is important to have negative keywords for recruitment terms i.e. ‘careers’, ‘hiring’ and ‘vacancies’. With this, your ad campaign can be measured for effectiveness in terms of promoting the sale you have on. If you wanted to run an ad campaign for a recruitment drive, it would be advised to list negative keywords for the likes of ‘sale’ and ‘special offer’ etc. Negative keywords assist your ad campaigns to serve their intended purpose and also so that you can measure their results and effectiveness.
How do I access Negative Keywords?
Within your Google Adwords account dashboard, navigate to the ‘Keywords’ tab and then click on ‘Negative Keywords’ which is positioned below the main table. Here is where you can enter the keywords that you do not want to be associated with particular ad campaigns. It is important to continually update this list and remember that it does exist. It is not uncommon for users to neglect this list and then be left wondering as to why an ad campaign is not registering online for a particular keyword. Perhaps you have assigned this as a negative keyword in the past which was required at the time – it will need to be removed from the negative keyword list in this instance.
Google Adwords is a huge and powerful tool that can help to drive customers and sales to your business. Our websites also drive customers and sales to your business and so our expert digital and online marketing time are adept at using and getting the most from Google Adwords. Get in touch with us today to launch a campaign that helps you to reach your online aims and goals and reaps the maximum potential for your business and for your business website.
