Negative Keywords in AdWords

Getting the right visitors to your site is the core challenge of your marketing activities, but it's worth remembering that keeping the wrong type of visitor out of your targets also helps to ensure a high level of efficiency.

From an AdWords perspective this is where 'negative keywords' come in. Negative match keywords help control who sees your advert by ensuring certain inclusions within their search query disqualify them from your targeting group.

To give an example of this, lets consider a high-end furniture store. They want to drive traffic to the sofas on their site, and so they will need to bid on a phrase-matched keyword, such as: 'leather sofa' - without the application of negative keywords they would also appear in the search engine results for a whole range of terms, including 'luxury leather sofa', 'buy leather sofa', 'used leather sofa', and 'cheap leather sofa'.

It's very likely that these last two examples would result in a high bounce rate and poor conversion rates, because the high prices don't match the intent given by the actual keywords. So by applying terms such as; 'used' and 'cheap' as negative keywords to your campaign, you are allowing the advertiser to drive a large number of visits to your site by bidding on what is quite a generic keyword, but you're also giving the campaign an extra level of relevance.

One of the most useful reports you will find within AdWords is the Search Query Report – this basically gives you a window into the actual search queries which triggered the advert. This allows you to not only find new keyword variations with which to build out the keyword list, but also to identify negative keywords to help make your campaign more efficient. It's worth noting that this report is also found in Google Analytics if you have an AdWords account linked to it, giving you the added benefit of getting onsite behaviour metrics –which is useful for gaining further insights into your keyword segments.

Aside from optimisation purposes, negative match keywords can be useful for brand protection. A common example of this would be a company which is advertising on credit cards. A term with reasonable traffic is 'credit card scam' – by ensuring 'scam' is entered across all their campaigns, this removes the possibility that their adverts (and importantly, brand name) are not associated online with this subject.