One of the more common things I find on a monthly basis when analyzing client Ads accounts, is more negatives to add to our keyword lists.  A negative keyword is a keyword you add to your “Negative Keywords” list on either a campaign or adgroup level.  If you add a negative, your ad will not show up if that word or phrase is a part of the search phrase.  This is extremely important when you use broad keyword matches, which are the default, and also the most common used match when I see people doing Google Ads for themselves, or even when I have been reviewing corporate accounts that have come to me to help them with ineffectiveness.

Google often suggests people set up accounts with broad keyword matches because it will allow for similar phrases you haven’t thought of or common spelling errors, etc.  The problem with that, is it also allows your ads to show up with many, many phrases you don’t want to show up for. I have blogged about this in the past, but suffice to say if you are using broad keyword matches, you also have to have negative keywords. As Google Ads has evolved and Google has changed definitions to other match types, to give them more leeway to show your ads for phrases they deem close variants, the negative keyword has become more important than ever.  In fact, negatives should be added with most every review process. I have clients where we add negative terms every week, even with phrase and exact match only adgroups.

Let’s look at an example.  Say you are selling high-quality widgets and you create a Google Ads account with a basic adgroup that uses the broad match keyword term “widgets”.  Common searches that would come up and trigger your ad would be “cheap widgets”, “free widgets”,”widgets jobs” etc. These are very common phrases that come up and that you pay to show up for.  If you were to add “cheap”, “free”, and “job” to the negatives for this group or campaign, you wouldn’t pay for these typically low-value terms.  You will find out over time that certain words bring in bad traffic when combined with your core terms and you need to add them as negatives. You will also see when these “keyword leaks” get in, they can eat up your budget unnecessarily for a period of time.  Often when a client calls because the phones seem to have slowed or the forms aren’t filling like they were, we find that some strange phrase has suddenly been allowed into their campaign by Google and ate up their important budget. We add that phrase asa a negative, and things get back to normal.

Other common uses of negatives are in competitor names.  Some businesses want to show up for competitor names, especially if the competitor is not doing a good job keeping their customers.  However, often a competitor’s name combined with your service brings in bad traffic because they were specifically looking for another business and landed on your page by mistake.  If you have a very high bounce rate for competitor names, you may want to add them as a negative term, or consider creating a landing page that speaks specifically to how you outperform that competitor. Remember though, once shots are fired, your competitor will likely see this and then do similarly.

Consider potential negative terms when you set up your campaign and you can limit the budget leak before it even gets started with common negatives like “free” and “job”. If you have already been running your campaign for a while, take a look at your search terms report, which is different than your keywords, and it will show you many of the search terms you are paying for.  Dig into the stats for different phrases you see showing up regularly. It will definitely give you new ideas for negatives to get your campaign running a little tighter and more efficiently.