Negative keywords are commonly used within Google Adwords campaigns in order to eliminate those unwanted terms. Recently i have been experimenting with the idea that using negative keywords is not as essential as it is perceived by Google.
Firstly i want to say i do not want those PPC experts to throw the book at me and preach the importance of negative keywords. Sure for some campaigns they can be crucial however if the correct research is conducted across the market you are looking to launch your campaigns in then surely we can go without keywords.
Google Adwords data centre offer the following example surrounding negative keywords:
II. Example
The negative keyword –free trial would prevent your ads from showing on any search queries containing the terms free and trial. It would not prevent your ads from showing on variations of these terms, however. It also would not prevent your ads from showing on search queries that only contain one of the terms.
For instance, the search queries one-day trial and free test could trigger your ads, while free one-day trial could not.
No doubt this explains the importance of negative keywords to the beginning however i tend to stay away from negative keywords and research my campaigns in depth in order to cover all potential keyword avenue’s without the use of negative keywords. Let me explain using an example I previously used in my post on the difference between Broad,phrase and exact match keywords.
I recently worked with clients who offer an ecommerce website for water features. I typically research the niche market the campaign is aimed towards and understand the constrains of the clients budget, the average cost per click on the top performing keywords amongst other techniques.
The introduction of the broad, exact and phrase match keywords has enabled us marketers to almost disregard negative keywords. In my humble opinion a successful paid search marketing campaign will discover all the possibilities of search aligned to a specific market. Granted there is the ability for people to misspell certain words however when you are working within a constraint budget its essential that you are targeting those specific keywords and those keywords only. Under these conditions i tend to adopt both phrase and exact match types ad opposed to broad match with negative keywords. This gives a more specific search criteria.
Researching your target market in detail and making sure you target all possible keywords which are typically searched is for me the most cost effective method available. Again i am not disputing negative keywords are important under some campaigns however typically i tend to adopt the use to tailored keywords on both phrase and exact match. This also helps you indentify what keywords are converting and gives a clearer picture on how your account is performing on a keyword to keyword basis.
Thanks for reading guys. Would love to hear your opinions.
Ryan
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