When working with Google Ads on a daily basis, you quickly realise that it is essential to keep a close eye on both your spend and your costs.
Perhaps you have experienced getting traffic from search terms that are not particularly relevant to your business – even though you have already set up some strong keywords?
You are probably aware that not every consumer is valuable to your business. Many are deliberately searching for a specific brand or product that may not match what you offer. If the opportunity for a sale is unlikely, it makes sense to try and avoid displaying your ads to those consumers.
Google Ads has a smart feature designed for exactly this: negative keywords
In the following, I will explain what negative keywords are and give you some practical tips on how to prevent too much of your Google Ads budget being wasted on irrelevant consumers.
There are definitely also situations where you should consider not using negative keywords, and I will cover that later in the post.
What are negative keywords?
Negative keywords allow you to prevent your Google Ads from appearing if a user searches for something that is not relevant to your business.
To give a simple example, a search on Google for “fire engine toy” could trigger your ad promoting real “fire engines”, if your campaign is not set up correctly. This is where negative keywords come into play.
By adding “toy” as a negative keyword, your ad will not be shown for search terms containing that word.
What are typical negative keywords?
If you run an online shop, you can often use the following keywords as negatives:
- used
- free
- dba
- loan
- rent
- demo
- cheap
By using these as negative keywords, you avoid attracting large volumes of traffic from users simply looking for a cheap, second-hand product in the same category as the one you sell.
The advantages of adding negative keywords:
– Your budget is used more efficiently.
– You attract more of the right customers to your website.
– Your conversion rate will increase (meaning the number of visitors who make a purchase goes up).
How do I add negative keywords?
Even when you set up your Google Ads account for the first time, it is a good idea to consider which negative keywords you might want to use.
It is always worth thinking about the following:
- Which brands do you want to avoid being shown alongside?
- Which quality labels do you want to avoid: cheap, used, rent, lease, etc.?
- Which industry are you targeting? For example, with the term Golf – is it sport or cars?
- Is your business B2B or B2C?
Choosing your negative keywords carefully is important, as they are used to exclude part of the market.
Often, keywords like “cheap” are chosen as negatives if you believe your product is of high quality. However, the definition of “cheap” can vary from person to person, and you might still capture part of this market by offering rental, leasing or attractive financing options.
If, for example, you want to prevent your ad from appearing on terms like “cheap toy fire engine” (because of the keyword “cheap” and only for these products), it is important to be precise when setting “cheap toy fire engine” as a negative keyword. Otherwise, you risk your ad not being shown for searches like “toy fire engine”.
Set “cheap toy fire engine” as a negative keyword with [exact match] – see the image below. Alternatively, you can set “cheap” as a negative keyword for the ad group you have chosen.
How do I find negative keywords?
A quick search online can provide long, topic-specific lists (though perhaps in English). However, these can be overwhelming and require thorough review.
Alternatively, your team might already know a number of terms that customers associate with your business, but which are not actually relevant for you.
If you have been running Google Ads for a while, you can use the Search Terms function within Google Ads to find the words users have entered before clicking your ad – see the image below.
Here, you can quickly highlight a search term and add it as a negative keyword.
Tip:
If you see a user’s search for “cheap red Volvo fire engine toy” in Search Terms, and it is not relevant to you, you can of course add the whole phrase as a negative keyword.
Alternatively, you can simply add “Volvo” as a negative keyword. This way, you cover many potential variations of a Volvo fire engine search.
You do this under Shared Library in Google Ads:
I have a limited budget; can negative keywords help me?
In this situation, it is even more important to identify many negative keywords right from the start.
Of course, you could simply add a lot of negative keywords in Google Ads. However, this can soon become unmanageable.
Instead, you should base your approach on the sales funnel, as this can give you a good idea of when in the customer journey you want your ads to appear. At the top – Awareness – where potential customers are just searching for information about products or services, you can limit your ad spend by excluding searches containing terms like “demo”, “test” or “reviews”.
However, if you have an excellent guide on how to choose the best product in your category, you should not select those phrases as negative keywords.
Further down the funnel, where the user is about to make a decision, you may want to avoid a specific customer type that often causes issues. Negative keywords in this case might be “discount”, “cheap”, “dba”, “free delivery”.
I have a large budget; should I still use negative keywords?
In this case, you can afford to be a bit more experimental. Try starting without negative keywords and see what happens. It can be very insightful to see which keywords your potential customers actually use.
However, you should monitor your spend closely and ideally check it daily, as campaigns without negative keywords can quickly eat through your budget (you have remembered to set a daily cap, right? Good…).
You can then regularly check ‘Search Terms’ within Google Ads and see which keywords are not generating conversions/sales or seem irrelevant.
It is time-consuming to set up negative keywords
You might be wondering if there is a shortcut or an easier way to do this?
…”no” is the short answer… but:
If you have a very limited budget, you can set the keywords that trigger your ads as [exact match]. For example, you can choose the keyword [fire engine toy], and then your Ads will (almost) only be shown when a potential customer searches specifically for fire engine toy and not for used fire engine toy.
Google can still be creative and show your ads anyway, but the number of impressions is significantly reduced.
Conclusion:
Although negative keywords are often a good idea, it is not always a solution you should necessarily use.
Are you missing out on traffic, or have you lost a lot of traffic after adding a negative keyword?
Then you might want to remove it from your negative keyword list and regain those impressions.
Make a note of when you make the change and monitor how your sales develop in general.
Keep an eye on ‘Search Terms’ to see if they end up contributing to sales or conversions after all.
As always, it is crucial to understand your customers’ behaviour. When you know how and for how long a customer searches for information before making a purchase, it becomes easier to decide whether a keyword should be set as negative or not.
It could be that customers first search and click your ad, then call you. In that case, it would be unfortunate to exclude a keyword that drives a lot of traffic but does not seem to convert immediately.
Tip:
If your best keyword has a double meaning and you cannot simply set it as negative, then spend extra time on your ad copy to clearly signal who you are targeting and what your product offers.
Other relevant articles:
How to do a keyword analysis
Google launches improved split testing options
