Sarah’s Corner

I have been working in search engine marketing for 8 months now. As I am usually building my campaigns from scratch, I only recently realised how important is the use of negative keywords. They enable to better target the ads, increase the click-through-rate and reduce the cost-per-click. Very useful, isn’it?

However, you can ruin your campaign if you do not carefully chose the match type of your negative keywords! Most of us would use broad match for them. This can seriously impact when the ads show. A broad match negative keyword can  filter out many search queries, including the ones that we would have wanted our ad to show on.

This briliant article found on Inside Adwords, the Google Adwords blog, very well explains how to optimise your campaigns by adding negative keywords and choosing the right match type for them. 

They take the example of a men’s accessories retailer who does not want his ads to show up when users are searching for women’s silk scarves.

Their smart graph, here below, shows that if he uses negative broad (-silk scarves), he will prevent his ads from showing up for many of its products:

The negative phrase (-”silk scarves”) seems to be the best solution for his campaign.

It looks really tricky to add negative keywords in PPC campaigns. I can understand why SEM agencies do not even bother with negatives.

Nonetheless, if you want to make a difference and be a super-campaign optimiser, I reckon it is worthwhile spending a bit of time to think about negative keywords :-)

Since the last time I wrote on this blog, my life changed.

I eventually found a job that I enjoy! The company is cool, peole working there are great. And my job is fantastic!

I work as a Search Assistant for digital media agency ValueClick.

They own thousands of price comparison and shopping websites. My role consists in running search marketing campaigns to attract traffic on these sites and generate revenue for my company.

I have been working there for 1 month and I love to learn about the exciting world of SEM.

It is an exciting role as you can immediately measure the results of your campaigns.
You directly see the impact of a modification in your ad copy, or in the keywords you choose. The challenging side resides in being smarter than wicked Google and elude their traps…

Everyday, I play with different strategies and see what happens

My name is Sarah. I come from a bucolic town called Millery, located in Southeast France.

Attracted by its vibrations, I landed in London after my graduation, 5 months ago.

I enjoy surfing the web, wandering in London’s mews and discovering the Brits’ culture.

My ambition is to work in a digital advertising agency.

To be continued…