Negative is Still Positive with Google Adwords, and BING too.

Embrace Your Negative Side When Managing Paid Search Campaigns.

Five years ago I wrote a popular blog article on the use of negative keywords for Adwords, entitled Negative is Positive with Google Adwords.

Guess what? Negativity, in the form of negative search terms, is still a very useful tactic for refining your paid search campaigns, lowering your costs, and improving your conversions.

Both Adwords and BING provide easy-to-use tools to research and add negative terms to your campaigns and individual adword groups. Negative keyword search tactics are often ignored and underutilized, based upon my observations over the years... leading to large amounts of wasted effort and spending.

Negative is Positive with Paid Search

Why use Negative Search Terms?

Negative search terms help filter out people searching for things not relevant to your business.

One of the the challenges with paid search is that very different people may use identical or very similar search terms to access very different information and business solutions. Also called 'indirect search engine competitors', many bad things can happen to your search campaign if you find yourself inadvertently competing against indirect competitors.

For example, if your company sells 'brake shoe liners' to B-to-B industrial and mass transportation clients, your attempts to use paid search ads using search terms such as 'brake shoe' or 'shoe liner' may result in your ads competing against totally unrelated businesses selling 'shoes', 'brakes', 'liners', and variations of these keyword search terms. Not only will you pay more to be higher up in the rankings, but you may get clicks and 'leads' from confused or irrelevant visitors. You'll waste time, money, and harm your reputation as you attract 'garbage leads'.

Besides using more long-tail search terms, adding negative search terms will help cut back on the clutter and waste. If a potential searcher is looking for a search term which includes your negative keyword, your ad will not show. You just saved time, money, and reputation. Negative search terms to combat 'brake shoe liners' could include 'store', 'women's', 'sale', 'car', 'autoparts', etc. Your click through rate will climb, your quality score will climb, your conversion rate will climb, and more.

A well designed paid search campaign may, in fact, have more negative search terms than positive.

Google Adwords in particular has some great tools you can use to research both potential and actual search terms related to your keywords and your ads. You can actually review real Adwords search history for your adwords groups, select search terms which are not desirable, add and/or modify them to ensure there is no unintended problem with your positive search terms, and then load them as negative terms. You've just enhanced the performance of your campaigns.

One important word of advice regarding negative search terms... choose wisely, selectively, and sparingly. Try to keep to one-word negative keyword lists, as this will reduce the risk of accidentally filtering for good keywords. Better to use 'automobile' as negative term than 'automobile research', if your company conducts research for clients, for example.

Lessons Learned from Ten Years with Google Adwords

Negative is Positive with Google Adwords

I am called many things, but being negative is usually not one of them. However, when it comes to managing Google Adwords campaigns, I am proud to wallow in negativity!

Using "Negative Keywords" can greatly filter out and reduce wasted clicks on your Adword campaigns, lessen the chance of confused (irrelevant) visitors and help your overall campaign costs, conversion rates and cost-per-conversion. They also help reduce the load on enquiry centers handling the enquiries. I am a big fan of the aggressive use of intelligently selected negative keywords.

Adding negative keywords and search terms is rather easy... you can add them manually and/or, (strongly advised) research the term first with the Google Keyword Tool. You'll be amazed at the sheer number of similar search terms entered by people which have no relevance or value to your B2B campaigns.

An example of a negative term is one related to a desired search term, for example, 'Chemical Lab'. I want people who need professional B2B chemical analysis services. I don't want people looking for a 'Lab' as in 'Labrador Retreiver', or a 'Lab' puppy. So -dog, -dogs, -puppy, -puppies, etc, all go negative for this campaign. This is a simple task with the Keyword tool. For us, other great related negative terms include '-job', '-jobs', '-drug lab' etc. Filter the worthless search terms as much as you can.

I have quite a few campaigns where my negative terms outnumber my positive search terms... and these campaigns greatly benefit from this strong filtering. Conversion rates jump, costs slump. Very positive results from going negative.

Caution: Negative Search Terms and Names can have a very powerful filtering impact, and if you are not careful, unintended consequences can hurt your campaign. For example, if I had used 'lab puppy' as a broad negative search term, I could be filtering out other desirable 'lab' related searches. Going negative for [lab puppy] is better. Using only 'puppy', a very specific one word negative search term, is the least risky of all. I try to keep my negative search terms to one word each. Keep this possibility in mind when adding negative phrases or word combinations.

I use negative keyword terms in B2B campaigns across global business streams, niches, regions and languages, a 24/7 operation. Going negative helped reduce my spend on poor quality clicks and sparked higher conversion rates. If you're not using negative search terms yet, you're likely wasting money and time, which is never a good situation.

Embrace Your Negative Side When Managing Paid Search Campaigns.

Increase Adword Conversions and Reduce Adword Spend, Take One

I received a good Paid Search question from a SEM marketer in LinkedIn recently:

"We use Google Adwords, about $X000 a month I think and most of our conversions are unqualified leads. We have tried different campaigns, keywords and a competitive approach, but nothing seems to work too well. Any advice?"

I use Google Adwords for driving in B2B enquiries, it is an important part of our web lead generation efforts along with Organic Search (our top priority). I use Adwords across the world for key global markets and languages. I manage these large campaigns on a daily basis, because trends and news across the world can change and drive new business opportunities.

Last year I concluded that we should attempt to raise our Conversion Rates (already considered 'good' by Google) and lower the cost-per-conversion (already low) and reduce overall Adword Spend. The goal was to squeeze even more efficiency out of every Adwords dollar I spend.

I acheived this result by Optimizing Search Terms and Filtering, Filtering and Filtering.

Before diving into Adwords tactics and strategies, the content on your landing page must be optimized first and foremost.... landing page content should be focused, concise and precise. Let the visitor know exactly what you offer, the benefits, and include a call to action. This greatly helps filter out low-quality visitors not relevant to your business.

Since last summer, I reduced Adword spend by over 50% and increased conversion rates by over 100%, and cut cost-per-conversion significantly. This took time and attention, coupled with a good understanding of target markets.

To find good search terms, the Adwords Keyword Tool is a great source. Looking for long-tail niche terms is like looking for gold nuggets... worth the effort. Great search-terms can also be found in your Analytics and from you Customers and Busines Development reps.

Extremely important in helping filter out casual or confused Adword clicks is an aggressive use of Negative Search Terms. Heavy use of negative keywords helps to greatly reduce the number of unwanted clicks from casual or confused visitors.

Use of Phrase "keyword" and Exact [keyword] search terms also helps focus and filter how and when your ad will show.

Using the Adword Geography and Time Scheduling features is very important to help reduce low quality clicks. If you don't want to show ads in a particular Nation or State, make sure your settings are correct. If you don't want to show ads between 11 PM and 5 AM in Texas, make sure this is covered.

Your Price per click settings and Budget settings are also important. This helps determine ad rankings, and Ad rankings help determine the number of people who click the ad.

Ad Ranking is very important. Many ads I run are at the number 2, 3, 4 or lower positions, and I am very happy.

Why? Because I only want the Qualified Visitor... someone who is motivated or interested in doing business with my company. I don't want casual visitors who click the number one ranked ad out of curiosity or confusion... those can be wasted clicks that hurt Conversion results and raise cost.

My efforts resulted in a much higher conversion rates and significant reduction in spending. And yet... one can go too far in this process. At some point focus can be so tight that good potential enquiries from people who use a low-quality search term can be lost. I am considering this challenge... so I may engineer a reduction in conversions to widen the Adwords Campaign focus for certain niche campaigns. Running large and successful Adwords campaigns is not unlike being an active Stock Trader... daily attention is required in a dynamic market for Search Terms.

Erik Holladay

Google Adwords Professional

Global Marketing Director