What exactly is a negative keyword?  Google defines it as “a kind of keyword that prevents your ads from showing on irrelevant search queries.”  You can not only define when your ad shows up (using keywords) but you can also define when they don’t show up (using negative keywords).

Including negative keywords in your search engine account can save you money, and help the performance of your pay-per-click promotions. 

Not only is this one of the fastest ways to improve results on your Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns, it is one of those deals that you can implement and forget about it.  Or if you wish you can aggressively add negative keywords to keep increasing your savings.

Negative Keyword Examples:

- Book Sales: - used, - phone, - address, - rare, - text
- Beauty Supplies: – hair – makeup artists – animal tested – day spa – tips
- Business Insurance: – agents – car- auto- health – disaster – scams

Action Tips
Contacts and sources to assist you

Don’t allow your ads to be placed anywhere that would be harmful to your business

If you sell motor homes you certainly do not want to appear on the same page talking about the record gas prices.  The same would hold true for a produce wholesaler and the recent ban on tomatoes, spinach and peppers.  Certain aspects of your research can be done prior but there are things that we cannot control and come up “out of the blue”.

Tip - Stay on top of your brand name and topics related to your business using Google Alerts or Google Trends.

Engage in high volume traffic without the risk

Negative keywords permit you to pursue high volume search terms without being visible for unrelated searches.  If you appear on an unrelated search, your click through rate (and consequently ad position and cost per click) can be affected.  Also you could be spending money on clicks that most likely will not materialize because the searcher was not looking for the service or product you offer.

Tip - Investigate your high cost keywords using Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool.  Choose ‘Possible Negative Keywords” from the drop down menu to access their help in selecting negatives for your projects.  There should be at least a list of twelve possible competitors. 

Focus your campaigns on your marked audience

Your key campaigns have to know your business as well as you do.  If you are a shoe company that specializes in running and athletic shoes , you may want to include keywords such as “designer heels” or “dress shoes” as negatives.  Likewise if you are a classic car dealer, you would want to include “hybrid” or “fuel efficient” as negatives.

Tip - Again, use your keyword research using Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool.  Make sure to search using keywords that portray your business, not just the top volume words.  Review indirect competitors that may share your central search term but don’t have the same business objective.

How to utilize negative keywords on Google AdWords

One of the easiest places to start using negative keywords is by using AdWords.  Two versions are available for you to access: Campaign negative keywords and AdGroup level negative keywords.  In most instances, you can put all your negative keywords at the Campaign level.  Just navigate to: ‘Edit Campaign Negative Keywords’ under the Tools menu to enter your keywords.  To operate on AdGroup level negative keywords, you can enter your keywords directly into the AdGroup easily by inserting a negative sign(-)directly before the term.

Tips and Tricks

Useful advice for making the most of this Guide.

• Use due diligence when you research  new keywords to add your campaign. It is an easy step that will save you money.
  
• Use a separate file to save any negative keywords in your AdWords account instead of just typing them into the box.  This will make it easier to use these words across multiple campaigns.
• Use caution that your negative keywords don’t exclude other alternatives.  For the Book Sales the term “blue” for a negative keyword could have been used to exclude the sight Kelly Blue Book. Unfortunately, that would keep people form seeing the ad if they searched for books such as The Island of the Blue Dolphin.
• Don’t use your competitor’s brand name as a negative keyword, because this can be valuable traffic at low CPCs.