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 :-)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under SEM Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.