adCenter Blog

SEM Beginner Series: What are Negative Keywords?

posted Wed, Dec 30 2009

This is the 9^th post in the SEM Beginner Series, following last week's post, part 1 of 2 on measuring success. This series of posts is intended for new search engine marketing professionals that are looking for guidance to help identify, monitor and adjust the key performance indicators (KPIs) that determine the success of a PPC campaign. Previous posts in this series discussed click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), ad copy, dynamic text, ad position, natural versus paid search and relevancy.

What Are Negative Keywords and Why Are They Important?

An easy way to filter out unwanted traffic is by using negative keywords - specific words or phrases that help to prevent your ad from being displayed to customers who are unlikely to click your ad. Negatives keywords can help reduce costs by keeping your ad from appearing in unrelated searches that drive little or no return on investment (ROI). And in turn, your click through rate (CTR), position and cost per click (CPC) may improve.

Let's say you sell upscale hotel rooms in Orlando, Florida. To ensure your ads do not show up for people searching for cheap hotels in Orlando, you should add "cheap" as a negative keyword. Keep in mind that your ad will not appear if the negative keywords appears anywhere in the search query.

It is easy and beneficial to use negative keywords. They can be set at the campaign, ad group or keyword level, however, negative keywords are pulled from the lowest level that exists for any keyword. So, if you have negative keywords implemented at the campaign and keyword level, the keyword level negative keyword will be used.

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is a great resource to research negative keywords that can be applied to your account. Also, negative keyword lists are limited to 1,022 characters including commas.

Negative Keywords and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Similar to relevancy, negative keywords are not considered key performance indicators. However, they can be used to help improve other KPIs. Using negative keywords will ensure your ad does not match to irrelevant searches, which will help to improve CTR, position and CPC.

Troubleshooting Tips

Now that you understand negative keywords and how they are used, visit the links below for optimization tips and tricks:

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

Five Tips for Creating Successful PPC Ad Copy

Researching Negative Keywords in adCenter

Qualifying Traffic with Negative Keywords

Five Tips to Improve your Microsoft adCenter ROI

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below or visit our forums.

Filed under: negative keywords, optimization, sem beginner

Comments

Fri, Jan 01 2010 11:28PM

Hector

This is a really great article! I have yet to see anyone speak on negative keywords, and keywords are so important in SEO and SEM marketing. Being in the SEM Manager area of SEM/SEO it's always nice to come across great articles like this one!
Wed, Jan 06 2010 07:49AM

TheLostAgency

It is often great to have a set of common campaign level negative keywords that you can use for most clients, but it is usually best to control negative keywords at a ad group level which are offensive or regional. An example is that within Australia we often seem to see popular international cities/locations showing within search results.

Some campaign level negative keywords: london, new york, usa, texas, scotland

Uses at a campaign level for a wedding limo driver might be "employment" but for the following ad groups these might be some useful negative keywords specific to that ad group.

school formals negatives: weddings, taxi, airport

wedding negatives: taxi, school, cheap, airport

transport negatives: bus, train, cheap

If you used these at a campaign level you might be cutting out some relevant traffic to some of your more niche campaigns or limiting the reach of your more general campaigns. Negative keywords are a very effective way to control your campaign and limit wasted clicks but you need to understand how it can affect your campaign when using different match types: broad, phrase or exact.