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

Managing Adwords Avoids Increasing PPC Cost

Many B2B Adwords managers suffer increasing costs of pay-per-click campaigns in order to "stay competitive". And every Adword veteran has treasured paid search-terms that were not only effective, but really cheap and cheerful a few years ago. Now, thanks to more competition for keywords on a global scale, these same search terms are becoming more and more expensive to run with high rankings.

But there are strategies which help avoid this PPC price trap...

During the last year, I didn't experience Adword PPC inflation, but rather PPC deflation.

My overall global campaign costs are reduced and campaign quality has increased:

1. Total Adword Spend down over 50%
2. Already low Cost per Conversion down over 50%
3. Cost per Click down over 25%

And by spending less and with more selectively I gained better quality:

1. An already high Conversion Rate jumped over 35% from the prior year.
2. With conservatively counted conversion rates of over 8%, 20% and higher.

To get these happy results, I focused on separating search-term wheat from the chaff, by going for more long-tail terms and exact and phrase match options which have relevance to my targeted customers, micro-managing time and location settings, using Adsense content ad filters heavily, and using google hegative search terms aggresively to help my campaigns stay focused on the markets I wanted, and where and when I wanted them. I was able to acheive this across campaigns, global geography and languages without using an outside consultant.

Simple Adword campaign changes can yield big results.

Ad Position:
Another great way to limit PPC costs is to focus on the number 3 or 4 or 5 ad positions. Why? 1 and 2 get more clicks, this is true, but they get many more casual clicks of lower quality. You pay more for less.

By being lower in rankings but high enough to get noticed you filter out casual clicks and attract more quality visitors from the core market you seek. You pay less for more.

Monitor Conversion Rates before Click-Through-Rates:
For B2B at least, getting conversions for the sales funnel is more useful for ROI than the initial clicks. Follow conversion rates closely. Click-through rates do offer guidance for potential keyword search term trimming, enhancement and improvement. But the Conversion Rate rules as a top priority for gauging your campaign quality, effectiveness and efficiency.

Trim, Filter and Block Search Term Options:
For example, if you were targeting "Engineering Services", which is very broad search term, back in 2003 it was cheap, but it's not now. The search term is hyper-competitive in Google Adwords. But instead of total surrender, or gritting your teeth and paying more and more in a never-ending price war spiral with your competition, get creative with long-tail search terms to help get around tough PPC situations like this.

Ask yourself; who are your real, paying, customers?

If your target is the Engineering Services for the Nuclear Cold Fusion Industry, for example, then you have options which will be cheaper to run and more effective. Try not using the high cost search term "Engineering Services", it is too broad and expensive. Try more focused search terms like "Cold Fusion Engineering" or "Cold Fusion Energy Engineering" or "Fusion Widget Engineering", etc. Google's Keyword Tool can help you discover related many terms as searched for in Google. Choose quality search terms over 'popular' ones. A search term may be very popular, but perhaps too broad and expensive to run an ad for. Going for long-tail search terms will usually be much less expensive than "Engineering Services".

Extremely important when using the Keyword tool is to also identify the -negative search terms you want listed. Using negative search terms reduces the chance your ad will show up for a search term that is not related to your product or service, thus helping avoid wasted clicks, which saves your campaign budget. For example, having a negative term set for "software" and "web" is a wise idea for any campaign going after "Cold Fusion Engineering" search terms! You don't want to be confused with a software company if your product is a service providing nuclear industry technical engineering expertise.

It is true that there will always be search terms that you absolutely want.... you along with 10 of your favorite cut-throat competitors. In those cases still try to find allied long-tail search terms and negative terms you can use...use the geography and time settings. These and other tactics will help you keep your PPC spend down.

In B2B marketing, there are thousands of technical and industry niche search terms which produce few clicks but yield high quality visitors and profits. It takes some time to research and implement these actions, but they will pay off in the end.

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.