The third series in our Revitalize your PPC Campaign in 5 Days is using negative keywords to weed out unqualified traffic, control your spend, and only trigger your ads to show towards more qualified traffic.

Negative keywords are used to weed out unwanted or irrelevant traffic to your campaign. These are keywords, terms and phrases within your ad group that you don’t want your ad to show up for.

For example, if you’re selling books online but you’re not a book club, you should use the negative keyword “book club” then your ad shouldn’t trigger for the keyword ‘book club.’ Negative keywords are mainly used for terms that your ad is likely to trigger for, but isn’t the kind of traffic your wanting. For example, if you’re selling magazines online, you may want to add the negative keyword, ‘free’ to your ad group. This will prevent your ad from showing up for the search term, ‘free magazines’.

Not only can adding negative keywords to your account save you money, but by eliminating unwanted or irrelevant traffic to your site, it could improve your click-through rates and conversion rates, therefore improve your ROI and your quality score.

How to Add Negative Keywords into Your Accounts

Adding negative keywords to your account is simple in Google. You add negative keywords just like you would add any other keywords, only with a negative sign (-) in front of it: Example, -free.

In Yahoo it’s a little trickier. You can only have what they call, excluded keywords at the account level or at the ad group level. If you click on the administration tab, then click edit on the Tactic Settings window, you can add any amount of excluded words you’d like. At the ad group level you can click on the Campaign settings drop down, the Tactic settings to ad negative keywords at the ad group level.

For more detailed information on negative keywords you can view my previous post here.

In conclusion, if you want a way to effectively weed out unwanted or unqualified traffic, enter negative keywords into your campaign. It will save you money and headaches in the long run!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 7:06 am and is filed under PPC Management Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.