One of the biggest problems that every Google AdWords campaign faces is wasting your budget on irrelevant traffic. Nothing is worse than spending your marketing dollars on irrelevant searches and have nothing to do with your product or services. To help advertisers earn a better ROI and generate more relevant traffic, Google incorporated “negative keywords” in their AdWords platform. Negative keywords are a type of keyword that doesn’t allow your ad to be triggered by a certain word or phrase. If someone enters in a search that contains your negative keyword or phrase, your ad will not show up. For example, if you set “free” as a negative keyword, you are telling Google not to show your ad for searches like “free criminal defense lawyer”. Any search term with the word “free” in it will no longer trigger your ads and help save your budget from potential clients looking for cheap or free services.
A major key to a highly-targeted campaign is choosing what keywords not to target. When you are looking for negative keywords to implement, it is important to search for words and phrases that might be similar to the keywords used in your campaign, but might be looking for something other than what you offer. For example, let’s say you’re an optometrist selling glasses. You should add negative keywords for search terms like “wine glasses” and “drinking glasses.”
Ultimately, negative keywords not only allow you to prevent your campaign from generating irrelevant traffic but also help improve your targeting and ROI. This is done by showing your ads to potential leads who are genuinely interested in your product or service. The best way to prevent irrelevant traffic is to implement negative keywords into ALL of your campaigns. Most AdWords novices forget to implement negative keywords and then wind up wondering why they just wasted their marketing budget while receiving zero quality leads. At Next Level Marketing, we have used our 16 years of paid advertising experience to compile multiple negative keyword lists with thousands of keywords that could lead to irrelevant traffic.
When implementing negative keywords, you need to perform extensive research. For example, if you are a criminal lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, you need to research your competition and use their names and the name of their business as negatives as well. By doing this, you excluding your ad from showing up when people are actually looking for your competition, helping save your marketing budget so you can use it wisely. At Next Level, we carefully research your competition so your search queries aren’t filled with the businesses you are directly competing within your target market. It may be hard to figure out every one of your competitors in your targeted location, which is why it is important to carefully scan your search queries regularly. This allows you the opportunity to add new negatives if you see competitors or other undesirable keywords populate in your search terms.
Our Certified AdWords Professionals are constantly researching and monitoring campaigns and search terms to help our clients receive relevant traffic and ultimately improve their ROI substantially, which is why it is so important to use negative keywords. Without negative keywords, your campaign is vulnerable to irrelevant traffic and you will waste thousands of dollars before getting quality leads. If you find yourself wasting your marketing budget or need any help analyzing your search terms and implementing negative keywords, contact the PPC experts at Next Level Marketing. We provide free audits of your campaign so we can work together to help your campaign generate relevant leads and use your marketing budget to the fullest.
