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.
