Negative keywords in PPC are one of the most important considerations for the success of your campaigns. They might not get as much attention as bid strategies, ad copy, or landing pages, but negative keywords can quickly boost your ROI by stopping irrelevant clicks, protecting your budget, and keeping your data clean. This blog is
Negative keywords in PPC are one of the most important considerations for the success of your campaigns.
They might not get as much attention as bid strategies, ad copy, or landing pages, but negative keywords can quickly boost your ROI by stopping irrelevant clicks, protecting your budget, and keeping your data clean.
This blog is all about negative keywords and how you can use them to improve the effectiveness and ROI of your PPC campaigns almost immediately.
Negative keywords are what stop your ads appearing for keywords and phrases you want to avoid.
Imagine you’re trying to sell a premium product, but you’re showing in searches for things like “free” “, cheap” and “second hand”. That’s not the audience you want to get in front of.
Adding negative keyword filters signals to Google that you’re not relevant to these searches, meaning you won’t show up for them, protecting your budget.
When you’re paying for every click you get to your website, every click matters, along with the cost of that click. Adding negative keywords to your PPC campaigns has a number of benefits. Not only to your ongoing campaigns, but the perception of your brand.
Did you know that, according to one study, around 60% of spending is wasted because of poor targeting, resulting in irrelevant website clicks. A lot of this could be avoided by proactively adding negative keywords to Google ads accounts to make targeting more effective.
In PPC, Google prefers relevancy.
When a user clicks on an ad, Google wants to know the ad is related to what they’re looking for.
By removing irrelevant search terms and being more targeted with your ads, you can improve your click-through rate, relevancy, and quality score (which brings down your cost per click)
The context of how customers see your brand matters and can paint the way they perceive you.
If you’re trying to be a premium brand and customers are constantly seeing you in ads for free giveaways or budget products, they’re going to get the wrong impression about you.
Negative keywords ensure you only appear for relevant searches and protect your brand perception.
Although Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Product Liaison, has said that too many negative keywords can stifle Google’s algorithm, you need them to add some level of control as more bidding strategies become automated.
Although you do want some freedom for Google’s algorithm to explore search paths that could be beneficial, you need to keep some limits to prevent it from overreaching and wasting your budget.
The search report in your Google ads account shows you exactly what someone typed into the search bar to see your ad.
One simple way to identify negative keywords is to go down this list and add any irrelevant search terms to your negative keyword list.
If one of these keywords resulted in a conversion, you can also reference whether the conversion was a good or poor quality, and this can determine whether the keyword has value.
One simple way to organise negative keywords is to group them by themes based on your audience and intents.
For example, you could exclude keywords based on intent, adding “free”, “cheap” “, budget” as negative keywords on campaigns for premium products.
“Student”, “entry level”, “DIY”, and “beginner” could be used to exclude keywords based on your target audience.
You can also base negative keywords on relevance based on your location or remove any reference to careers or job seekers.
Another way to add negative keywords is to use match types.
For example, broad match can exclude any search that includes a negative keyword (just be aware this needs to be tested, as you could unintentionally block valuable traffic if your excluded keyword is closely related to what you actually sell; shoes vs running shoes).
On the other hand, exact match excludes only exact keyword searches, which is more targeted, but takes more work to manage and means you’ll be adding negative keywords over a longer period.
Here’s an example of how this would work.
Imagine you’re a mattress retailer doing PPC, but your ads are appearing for searches like “how to clean your mattress” or “mattress disposal service”.
These aren’t relevant because one is an information query, and the other isn’t related to what you offer. But you’re still paying for the click.
To fix this, you’d add negative keywords like “how to”, “clean” and “disposal” as phrase match negatives, which would exclude your ads from these searches.
Now let’s say you’re a software provider for accountants and your ads are showing for searches like “free accounting software”.
This isn’t the audience you want as you’re targeting accountants looking for paid subscription services.
The answer here would be to add “free” to your negative keyword list, and you could consider other options like “cheap”.
Negative keywords are an ongoing part of managing your PPC campaigns, and not maintaining them can have long-lasting implications on your Google ads account.
Without negative keywords, you always run the risk of attracting clicks from people who are never going to convert.
If you’re collecting poor-quality data in your campaigns, it can obscure which ones are performing well and which aren’t (if negative keywords are dragging down the performance of a campaign that would be profitable without them).
Getting clicks from low-intent users can artificially inflate campaign impressions, reduce your click-through rate and damage ad relevancy, which can impact your quality score and drive up costs per click.
Customers will associate your brand with ads they see you appearing for. If you start appearing in ads using phrases that aren’t relevant, like “free” or “cheap”, you run the risk of damaging your brand reputation.
This backs up what Google’s Ginny Marvin said about overly restricting the Google algorithm. If you’re too aggressive with negative keywords (particularly when using broad match negatives), you run the risk of excluding what could be commercially relevant searches.
Excluding keywords in one campaign could inadvertently remove all ads targeting similar searches in other campaigns, for example, removing “shoes” in one campaign could exclude “running shoes” in another.
Managing negative keywords is an ongoing process that needs regular reviews. It’s not just a case of creating one list and leaving it. You’ll need to constantly review what keywords or phrases your ads appear for. Especially as your ads and bid strategies evolve.
You can’t underestimate the importance of staying on top of negative keywords in your PPC campaigns if you want to reserve budget for high-converting clicks.
Without proper management, negative keywords can quickly become an anchor that drags down your ad account and prevents you from ever performing as well as you could.
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