Apr 21st, 2007
Choosing negative words for your AdWords campaign
Andrew Brice on JOS forum shared an idea on how to get your negative keywords set up correctly in AdWords to maximise your campaign’s ROI. Along with common practice of server log analysis he suggested to search for all your key AdWords terms at http://search.live.com. The ‘Related searches’ will show the phrases irrelevant to your product. You must add these as negative keywords at the campaign level in AdWords.
For example searching for “table plan” (Andy’s niche) brings up irrelevant (for Andy) searches of “Poker Table Plans”, “Picnic Table Plans” etc. So he can just add “Poker” and “Picnic” as negative keywords.
I’d like to share a similar approach. I use Google toolbar suggestions to find the negative keywords. For instance, if I type “help file” in the Google toolbar search box it brings a list of suggestions. Among the suggestions there is “help file extension” term. So “extension” is a candidate for the negative list.
Then, if I type a letter after the “help file”, e.g. “help file c”, the toolbar brings me “help file converter”. “Converter” also goes to the negative list: Dr.Explain does not convert, it creates help files. So, playing with letters after your search term in Google toolbar will help you significantly expand your negative word list and make your AdWords campaign more targeted.
that’s a great tip, using suggest tool to quickly find negative keywords. easier than doing a search at live search. the results on suggest are also sorted according to search volume which is also important for choosing negative keywords. too bad the list is so short. your tip about going thru the alphabet is smart.
I must admit, I’ve never considered using the Google Toolbar or live.com search, I’ve always stuck to using my StatCounter logs and when I feel people are finding my site using a keyword/phrase that I don’t consider relevant I add the words to as negative/excluded. I do however check firstly, to see if it actually converted and how many pages they actually looked at, just to confirm it really was a pointless visitor.
Hi,
Well you can also use Google Analytics to see what keywords attract your visitors and check the bouncing rate of each one to find new negative keywords.
Mario: You are right but in this case you have to wait for some time to collect the statistics in Google Analytics. The trick with suggestions allows finding negative words even before running your AdWords campaign.