Use Negative Keywords to Better Target Google Ads

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Jul 18, 2007

I worked with a company earlier this year that was managing their own Google Adwords advertising, but getting terrible results. The marketing manager had attended a seminar on internet marketing and came back eager start driving traffic to her company's website. After three months, they had spent a small fortune paying for clicks that delivered a dismal two sales leads. But with one simple change, I cut their ad expenses by over 80% and also increased their conversion ratio six fold.

The company manufactures crash test dummies and related components. Like most companies, they had no staff with expertise (and in this instance, no previous experience) in PPC (pay per click) or online advertising. The company’s marketing manager, Kristen, attended a seminar hosted by a strategic online marketing planning & management company. While the seminar was undoubtedly useful, it only provided attendees with enough information to be dangerous, or in this case, disastrous, when using Google’s Adwords PPC advertising system.

The first series of campaigns that Kristen prepared consisted of 14 ads, displayed throughout the entire Google ad network, using these key words:

• Crash test dummies
• Crash test
• Dummies
• Crash dummies
• Crash dummy
• Dummy
• Crash test dummy
• Test dummy

They were paying between 10 cents and $1.20 per click for these keywords. They were averaging over 200 clicks per day for this campaign at a cost of between $63 and $95 per day. But they also had a 99.2% bounce rate (a bounce is a visitor that clicks your link and then clicks the Back button without viewing any other pages in your site)!

The primary reason they had such a high bounce rate, and thus were wasting so much money, is that their keywords were too broad and also shared by a popular music band named the “Crash Test Dummies”. Their ads were also poorly written, but that’s a subject for another post.

To correct the issue, I implemented three immediate changes:

1. I added negative keywords to the campaign
2. I configured exact phrase matching instead of broad keyword matching
3. I rewrote nearly all of the ads

Negative Keywords

Many of the people who clicked the company’s ads were searching for information on the Crash Test Dummies band. To prevent ads from showing when people were searching for the band or other unrelated subjects, I instructed Google to not show the ads when a search included these keywords:

-band
-lyrics
-song
-concert
-ventriloquist
-movie
-computer
-Windows

By placing the dash (or minus sign) in front of the keyword, I’ve instructed Google to not show the ads when those words are present in the search query. So now when people are searching for Crash Test Dummies song lyrics, ventriloquist dummies or even an explanation for why their computer crashed, the company’s ads do not display.

Phrases Versus Broad Matches

The default Adwords ad mode is called Broad Matching. Using the key phrase "crash test dummies", Google will display the company's ads anytime a search query contains the word crash or test or dummies. For example, if someone searched for "windows crash", then the company's ad could appear. With the advertising popularity of the words "crash" and "test", the company was displaying their ads needlessly and generating hundreds of clicks per month for searches completely unrelated to their products.

In contrast, phrase matching allows me to tell Google to only display an ad it the query contains the phrase "crash test dummies", with words either before or after the phrase. I can also enclose the phrase in brackets, like [crash test dummies] to instruct Google to only show the ad when someone searches using that exact phrase, with no other keywords before or after the phrase.

By using a phrase match with negative keywords, like this:

"crash test dummies"
-lyrics
-concert
-song
-band

I've eliminated a large number of irrelevant ad views that could potentially waste advertising dollars.

You can learn how to use negative keywords at Google's website. You can also hire us if you'd prefer not to learn the finer details of PPC advertising the hard, expensive way. :)