Use Negative Keywords to Cut Your AdWords Costs

December 8th, 2011

If you’re using broad keyword matching in Google AdWords (which is the default setting that applies to all your keywords unless you specify otherwise), then your ads will almost certainly be getting shown to a lot of people who are not really part of your target audience.

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For example, if you are run a printing business and you are bidding on the keyword “business card printing” in its default broad match state, you’ll almost certainly end up with your ad appearing when people search on Google for “free business card printing”. These people aren’t the kind of visitors you want to attract to your website because they are unlikely to want to pay to get you print their business cards. But some of them will probably still click on your AdWords ad and end up costing you money.

Luckily, there is a solution within AdWords to limit this problem. It’s called negative keywords. By adding negative keywords to your campaign or ad group, you can instruct Google that if a searcher includes one of those negative keywords in the search terms that they enter into Google, you do not want your ad to appear. In this way, you can filter out the kind of visitors that are of no interest to you and avoid wasting money driving them to your website.

When you first create an AdWords campaign they will probably be some obvious negative keywords for your business that you can think of quite easily. For most businesses, these might be words like free, discount, cheap, etc. But there’ll still be lots of other inappropriate words that people are using in their searches which you won’t think of until you see them appearing in your search query report.

Monitoring the search query report is an important task that we cover in detail on our AdWords training courses. It’s also something that should be included in the AdWords management service if you decide to outsource the maintenance of your pay-per-click campaigns to an expert.

Whether you do it yourself or get a professional AdWords consultant to help you, implementing negative keywords correctly and regularly reviewing your AdWords account to see if additional negative keywords are required could easily save you hundreds of pounds a month in wasted click costs.

Got a question about negative keywords? Have you saved money by using negative keywords effectively? We’d love to hear from you. Just use the box below to leave a comment or ask us a question.