Google Adwords Negative Keywords

Phrase and broad match are excellent tools to use in an AdWords campaign to help you receive exposure on all the niche keywords associated with your products & services.

However, there are often a large variety of phrases you don't want your ads to be shown for.

This is where building a negative keyword list can improve your CTR, increase your relevancy, and increase your ROI as your not paying for clicks you don't really want.

With the new 'edit campaign negative keywords' tool in the 'Tools' section of AdWords. It's easy to switch between all your campaigns to run campaign level negative keywords. Just make sure you know which campaign you're affecting, as some negatives work for one campaign, but not for another and you could be canceling out keywords you're actually trying to bid for.

There are several ways to find negative keywords, and I'd suggest using a mix of all of these.

1. Google suggestion tool.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox Run your keywords in the tool. Look not only through the 'more specific keywords (which is also a place to find keywords to ad), but take a close look at expanded broadmatch as your keywords may be showing for these terms. Lastly, 'additional words', if you see more keywords here that aren't related to your product, add a few more. Keep adding negative keywords with your words in the suggestion tool until everything you see is related to what you're selling.

2. Site Logs.
Analyze your site logs (or more likely an interface program) to see what keywords people are searching for that are unrelated to your page. Every time you see a query which brought up your site which you don't want to pay for, add that to your negative keyword list.

3. The SERPs.
In 'Google Preferences', set number of results to 100. Do a Google search for your keywords, and if you see a site in the top 100 that you don't want to be shown for, see if there is a product they sell which is not related to yours, and add whatever keyword that product is using.

4. Ad Exercises
While you have the SERPs open, look through the other Ads. Do you see ads which are unrelated to these keywords? Often these ads are similar to yours as you are doing keyword research for your own products. If you see ads listed which don't seem appropriate, think about why they're showing, and what you'd add to make these ads not show for this keyword and what keywords are more likely to bring them a good CTR/ROI. This type of ongoing exercise can help to think of more keywords very quickly.

5. Overture inventory tool. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Type your keywords into the tool and see if there are queries that come up for which you don't want to be shown. If you see some, then more negative keywords to add. It's often suggested with this tool that you use slightly more general queries than your actual keywords if you start to see very low volume numbers just to get a slightly larger picture of the keyword combinations that occur with your specific keywords.

A note of caution.
When first performing negative keyword research. Start with the very obvious negatives. You should have some sort of conversion tracking system in place. Make sure you don't trim your exposure too much. There are many profitable keywords, which seem like they should be negatived out, but if they provide some ROI, then maybe they should be their own 'comparision keywords' instead. If you start adding lots of negatives and you not only see your CTR go up, but your total conversions starting to decline - you probably went to far and need to backtrack a little bit.

Google allows you a lot of control on exactly what queries bring up your keywords. Use the tools at your disposal to make sure your keywords are getting the more relevant and profitable exposure possible.