What are negative keywords, how do they work, and what are the benefits of using them?

If you are running a pay-per-click campaign, you may have heard about negative keywords. The use of a negative keyword list is very useful in filtering out unwanted traffic.  

You might want to use negative keywords if:

• You have zero conversions
• You have expensive conversions
• You have a limited budget
• You experience bad brand association
• You seek quality improvements
• You would like to lower your PPC costs 

What are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are a list of keyword or keyword phrases that help prevent your ad from being displayed to an unwanted audience for your PPC campaign. By doing so, you can keep your ad from showing up in unrelated searches that drive little to no quality traffic. This also helps you keep PPC costs down.

Let's say you sell high-end road bikes in Denver, CO. To keep your ads from showing up for people looking for "cheap" or "free" road bikes, you would add those keywords to your negative keyword list. So you simply identify the modifiers or adjectives that would cause your ads to trigger for undesirable traffic.

Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match

Before we move on, let's take a closer look at how broad, phrase, and exact match work. Let's start with the word "tennis racquet." If you use broad match with your campaign, then any keyword that has any of those variations will trigger your ad like these below.

When you use phrase match, any keyword phrase that uses words before and after "tennis racquet" will trigger your ads. If you switch to exact match, then your ads will only be served up if a searcher types in "tennis racquet."

It's important to see this difference so you can better understand how negative keywords will help you. If you use exact match, then you really don't need to use negative keywords. You only need them for broad match and phrase match.

Broad Match	"Phrase Match"	[Exact Match]
tennis	graphite tennis racquet	tennis racquet
racquet	tennis racquet
buy tennis racquet	buy tennis racquet
tennis racquet photos
tennis balls

Benefits of Using Negative Keywords

There are many benefits to employing a negative keyword list. You can probably guess many of them by now. Let's look at the effect of negative keywords on Quality Score, conversions, and leads, and the visitor experience.

Quality Score

• Quality Score - increase
• Ad position - increase
• Max cost per click (CPC) - decrease

Conversion/Leads

• Conversion rate - increase
• Qualified leads - increase
• Cost per conversion - decrease
• Profit - increase

Visitor Experience

• Relevancy - increase
• Bounce rate - decrease
• Brand association - increase
• Conversion rate - increase

Negative Keyword Tools

There are many tools available to help you identify negative keywords. Some keyword tools have a negative keyword tool built in, so check for that and try it out. They also should have the ability to check for synonyms. You can also just use a thesaurus. If you are using the Google Keyword Tool, paste your website URL into the "website content" box and check the results. It will show you keywords that come up and if any are undesirable, then add them to your negative keyword list. You may also want to change your copy on your site to reflect only your targeted keywords. This will help you with your SEO as well.

You can also use your website analytics tool. Check to see what keywords were used to find your site. Also, look at your monthly keyword report for keywords to add to your negative keyword list.

Your PPC campaign reports will hold some valuable information. Look specifically at the "search query performance report." This will show you keywords that triggered your ads so you can identify where to make adjustments.

If you are running a PPC campaign and not using a negative keyword list, I highly recommend you do. It will benefit you in many ways.