Negative keywords are those words or phrases that disallow your PPC ad from displaying for search terms which are unrelated to your website. Hence, in paid advertising, negative keyword management is an important foundation of an effective and fruitful PPC campaign. If properly managed by any internet marketing outsourcing company, negative keywords will improve your CTR (click-through rate), increase the relevancy of the audience and essentially, save you money.
It is therefore important that proper management of the negative keywords is implemented in order to maximize the effectiveness of this PPC strategy. Most online marketing outsourcing companies are probably familiar with some of the listed considerations.
- Run and Rely on SQR (Search Query Report). This is the essence of the negative keyword technique because it will give you data where your ads showed and what terms were used that made the ads show up which are relevant and not relevant to the business. Generating the SQR is recommended done at least once a week for new accounts and every few minutes for more mature accounts.
- Separate Campaign and Ad Group level negatives. Identifying which keywords belong to campaign level and which terms belong to ad group level is important in achieving an effective negative keyword strategy. Campaign negative terms could be wide-ranging words for products that do not belong to your business. Ad group level terms are the more specific and targeted words.
- Negative Keyword Should Lead Users to the Right Place. Internet marketing company running PPC ads should use negative keywords to bring users to the specific landing page of your website to avoid overlap.
- Don’t add too many at once. Some outsource internet marketing campaigns for large accounts tend to overdo it by running huge SQR audits and including too many negative keywords in the campaign. With bulk negative uploads, it will be difficult to identify exactly which negative keywords caused the issue.
- Create a Negative Keyword Lists. Managing account-wide negative keyword lists should never be difficult. One way is to create a spreadsheet which breaks the list into 3 categories: list of negative keywords, why they are negative keywords and where such keywords are found in your PPC ad.
- Differentiate Irrelevant and Poor at Conversion. Some negative keywords are included in the list because they are irrelevant. Others, because they showed that they fail to convert. Caution should be exercised before lumping irrelevant and poor-converting negatives with the regular negative keywords. It might be better to spin them off into new lower-bid ad campaigns.
- Run Regular Checks on Your Existing Negative Keywords. In order to make sure that negative keywords in your list remain to be negative keywords over time, and not blocking traffic that is relevant to your site, you should run regular checking on your negatives every few months. Updating the list and aligning it with the latest activities of the business will eliminate missing out on traffic because the keyword has not been removed from the negative keyword list.
Regular monitoring of the keywords you are working on will greatly increase your campaign’s effectiveness. By doing a regular check on your keyword, you see which one works and which one is not working. This way, you can save enormous amount of money, which could be used to increase the budget of the current ad that is already converting or it could be used to run another campaign for other keywords.
