adCenter Blog

Making the Most of Something Negative: Using Negative Keywords in your adCenter Campaigns

posted Mon, Jul 27 2009

by Simone Schuurer - MSFT

6 comments

I'd like to think of myself as a positive person. There is no end to what people moan about: the wrong type of warm weather, the structure of the froth on their cappuccino, visiting parents. Being positive makes a refreshing change. Here is something negative though that I am really positive about.

Negative Keywords

Adding negative keywords to your search campaign is one of the easiest optimisations you can do and it's free!

Negative keywords help to prevent your ad from showing up in search queries unrelated to your website when you bid on broad or phrase match. Negative keywords can increase your click through rate (CTR), improve your average position and decrease the cost per click (CPC).

So negative keywords can bring about a very positive change to your campaign!

Chocolate Labradors & Football Boots

How do you know negative keywords are needed? High impressions and relatively low clicks may indicate your keywords & ads are attracting unwanted attention.

The keyword 'chocolate' for example is a very relevant one for a chocolate manufacturer but the ad would serve about 100 times a month to people looking for 'chocolate Labradors' if you are bidding on phrase or broad match.

Your brand name may also be in need of negative keywords. The chemist Boots would attract traffic from thousands of users looking for footwear. Apple would not only attract traffic from users searching for IPods but also from Nigellas looking for apple crumble recipes if relevant negative keywords are missing from the campaign.

How to find negative keywords?

Pull a keyword performance report and find the high impression/ low click culprits and type these into the Keyword Research tool. Click on the 'negative keywords' tab to select the bits of these keywords you'll need. For a chocolate shop this process may look as follows:

When you find the negative keywords, remember a few things:

1. Only add the part of the keyword you don't want your ad to serve on (so for 'chocolate' the negative keyword would be 'Labrador' and not 'chocolate Labrador').

2. Separate the negative keywords with commas.

3. Individual negative keywords can have up to 100 characters. The maximum amount of characters for all negative keywords is 1024 including commas.

Campaign or ad group level?

Negative keywords can be added on campaign and ad group level. Ensure the keywords in your ad groups are closely related so that it is easy to capture the right negatives for all keywords in the ad group.

Negative keywords work on campaign level in a more generic way. If you only sell new cars for example, you could add 'second hand' on campaign level as a negative keyword to filter out inappropriate prospects.

Additional negative keywords on the ad group level override any added on campaign level.

How do you add negative keywords?

There are two ways in which you can add negative keywords:

1. To ad groups

2. To campaigns

If your campaign is managed, please contact your representative.

Below is an example of how to add negative keywords to existing ad groups. Find out the exact steps in the adCenter help file.

Other colleagues have written about this topic - find the posts here.

If you have any questions or comments please visit the adCenter Forum and if you haven’t already done so, you can keep up with notifications of new posts by becoming a fan on our Facebook Page or by following us on Twitter.

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Updated 7/31/09 to clarify campaign/ad group level negative keyword settings.

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Filed under: keyword research, negative keywords, Categories:Advertisers:adCenter:Keyword Research, Categories:Advertisers:adCenter:Negative Keywords, msa smb

Comments

Mon, Jul 27 2009 12:27PM

TheLostAgency

It can be great to have a set of negative keywords at a campaign level, that filter out high volume but very unrelated keywords that will are consistent for most campaigns.

Illegal: warez, hacking, stolen

Profane/Moral: adult, porn, sex

Unrelated: free, download, reviews,compliants

It is usually better to do a adgroup level negative list, as you may have a campaign that encourages business leads and another that encourages people to signup to your newsletter and another might be contact details. You should continually add negative keywords to this list and over time your campaign will continue to show improvements.

You should be careful when using broad match negative keywords as sometimes the keyword is close to your target but not exactly what you are trying to show your ad for and you block too much, exact match negative keywords can provide more control.
Tue, Jul 28 2009 07:36AM

seo traffic spider

nice post...
Fri, Sep 04 2009 11:51AM

Sheikh the Blogger

Suppose i have the keywords like "life term insurance" , "Whole life term insurance" and i am getting the traffic from the listing "term", and now if i put this keyword as a negative, it is going to block all the listings containing the word "term".

To avoid this,

1).we need to use the word term in exact phrase ie [term] as negative.

2). We need to generate the keywords by taking term as the seed word for that keyword tool, it generates number of listings, then we need to pick the irrelevant listings with high monthly volume and use them as negatives (but in phrase match)

eg: if i use term as the seed word for keyword tool and generater the keywords,

i get . life term, presidential term, elections term, term...

then i can use the irrelecant listings from them and add them to my negative list.

Hope this explains this
Tue, Oct 27 2009 07:36AM

Eddy

Why is the limit on the maximum chars for negative keywords so low? In my Adwords campaigns I have hundreds of negative keywords so that my campaigns are extremely targeted, surely there must be a way to have more negative keywords than the max 1024?
Mon, Feb 01 2010 09:05AM

Olivier Mullie

Nice Post. Especially the intro. I agree with Eddy that the amount of negative keywords allowed is rather low. This is made worse by the fact that ad group level negatives override any campaign level ones. Ideally, campaign level keywords should be able to exist regardless of any ad group level ones as they can be generic negatives that would cover all ad groups. Examples: cheap, free, ebay etc...
Sun, Sep 19 2010 02:20AM

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