One of the things that sets successful PPC campaigns apart from unsuccessful ones is that they don’t waste money on unnecessary advertising. They do this by using a strong negative keyword strategy to ensure that your ad reaches the right audience. This makes your campaign much more effective and shows a much higher return on investment. Learn how to use the right terms to avoid irrelevant searches and waste money.
The key to success is preparation
You can block keywords (KW – keywords) that lead to the wrong users before you even launch your PPC marketing campaign . There is no need to wait for the collected click data, which gives you enough time to prepare negative keywords. Add as many of them as possible before the campaign starts.
When searching for irrelevant keywords, follow the same steps as you would for PPC keyword research, but only collect the ones you intend to block. You can also find lists of these terms that vary in length for different industries.
Keyword research tools:
- Google Ads KW planner,
- ChatGPT, Google and other AI search platforms,
- third-party tools.
Help yourself with n-gram analysis
By analyzing n-grams, or single-word and multi-word phrases, you can identify words that make multiple search terms redundant and then block them. This saves a lot of time compared to blocking each term individually.
N-grams can be used to examine the performance of commonly occurring sequences of words. They can help you find entire strings of words that appear many times across many keyword phrases or search queries. This grouping can also help you better understand trends in campaign performance .
For example, if you have a cleaning cambodia mobile database company in Kladno and you provide your services only in that city, you would block the word Prague and other names of surrounding cities. If there are no relevant searches for these names for you, you can block them for all search queries, regardless of what other words appear in them.
Another example might be an air conditioning repairman who only services appliances in buildings. He blocks the word Auto for all phrases and is sure that he will not appear in searches for drivers who need to repair their car’s air conditioning. Just check the appropriate box in the Google Ads or Microsoft Ads panel and it is much faster than adding a bunch of exact match keywords.
Using multi-word exclusion clauses
Longer negative keyword combinations have a similar effect. However, be careful when using them and put them in quotes to make it clear that they are negative phrase match. Broad match types for multiple words are generally less effective, and while Google Ads is constantly improving negative keyword matching, it is important to monitor this feature closely.
For best results, use short, one- or two-word keyword research: avoid the biggest mistakes negative terms with a common theme, so you don’t have to add similar phrases over and over again.
Use exact match negative keywords only rarely, such as when a one- to three-word negative keyword is inadvertently blocking your search.
Manage negative keywords carefully
Related keywords and shared lists
When managing negative keywords, try to anticipate and detect irrelevant search queries before they negatively impact campaign performance. Add variations and related terms (jobs, careers, etc.) and pay close attention to this activity before launching your campaign.
Instead of wasting time manually checking boxes in your Google Ads search query report , add keywords directly to your campaign or shared list. Use negative keyword lists across multiple campaigns instead of adding them to cpa email list each campaign individually. They’re located in the Shared Library section, where you’ll find Exclusion Lists, and then Negative Keyword Lists.
In a shared library, you can also use tag lists to eliminate search terms that contain tags you don’t want.
Saving excluding KW for future use
By creating and continuously updating a table of the most used common negative keywords, you can save time when launching additional campaigns. For agencies, these lists, tailored for different industries, can be especially negative keywords useful when working on multiple campaigns in the same industry.
You can then use your saved top negative terms across all your accounts. For example, if your ads are showing unnecessarily for search queries related.