SPEEDPPC ARTICLES

Negative Keywords. . .should you use them?

Why negative keywords should be part of your stategy

There are many reason why your keyword strategy should include negative keywords.

Negative keywords let advertising platforms, such as Google Ads, know that you wish to filter our specific search terms. It’s the filtered terms that are not relevant to the products or services you offer.

Say you have an online clothing store that sells motorbike clothing but you have made a business decision to NOT sell motorbike helmets. ‘Helmets’ in this instance would be a important negative keyword to include in your strategy. This will ensure users are not clicking on your Search ads (that cost your money) and expect to see helmets in your catalogue.

Less impressions = increased CTR

If you are filtering out searches with your negative keywords and maintaining click volume, you’ll see your CTR improve. However it may be the case that a newly added negative keyword can cause your campaign impressions and clicks to drop suddenly. This could mean that your negative keyword has had an adverse affect and filtered out far too much traffic.

So it’s important to really understand keyword match types and how they work in parallel.

Negative keywords can have the same board, phase and exact match types applied to them. Using match types with negative keywords will apply an even stronger filter depending on the keywords you have included in your campaigns.

Higher quality clicks with negative keywords

If you apply an effective keyword strategy your clicks should be of a higher quality and therefore provide your business with a stronger opportunity to convert the desired business goals.

Don’t let your advertising platform assume anything!

Paid search platforms often assume if your sell A and B, AB must be relevant to your business as well. If AB isn’t relevant at all, AB becomes a very valuable negative keyword to include in your campaign.

As a result you can be more confident that the campaign ROI will continue to be maximised and you are not wasting clicks (and budget) when Google (for example) take it upon themselves to present your ad to a user looking for AB.

Check out all thing keywords in our Community knowledge base here.