In most marketing, especially traditional marketing, anything connected with the word ‘negative’ was usually a bad thing. But nowadays when you combine the words ‘negative’ and ‘keyword’ it turns out to be a great combination.  In fact, we can go as far to say that negative keywords are essential for your Google AdWords campaigns.

Confused? Well, you’re not alone.  Optimising digital marketing campaigns can leave some seasoned marketers scratching their heads.  Creating your campaign is relatively easy. It’s about ensuring you get good return on investment for your paid marketing efforts which is crucial to your digital marketing success.

To fully grasp the essential parts of creating and managing a successful digital marketing campaign, it’s critical that you complete a digital marketing course as oftentimes this type of advertising can be a minefield of trial and error and can turn out quite costly if not managed correct.

What are negative keywords

How can a keyword be negative?

Now that you know there is such a thing in the digital marketing world as negative keywords and how they can affect your paid-per-click (PPC) campaign, let’s take a closer look at what they and how important they are in SEO.

Negative keywords are a basic filtering tool that allows you to ‘filter’ out keywords that are irrelevant to your digital marketing campaign.  Once you’ve decided on your negative keywords you can ensure that Google does not show your ad when these keywords are entered into their search engine.

Avoiding unwanted clicks

In the world of digital marketing and SEO we all are clambering to drive traffic to our sites.  But when it comes to PPC (paid-per-click) advertising with Google AdWords, clicks that fail to give any returns are unwanted.  PPC marketing can become a very costly exercise and the key is to get people who actually are interested in your product or service to click through to your site.  There’s nothing worse for a marketer to see lots of click-throughs to their site with little conversions – this is extremely frustrating.  So, the bottom line is that we need to avoid unwanted clicks, and this is where negative keywords comes into play.

Negative keywords benefits

We’ve established that paying for unwanted clicks is a waste of your precious digital marketing budget and it’s to be avoided. To accomplish this is to establish a library of negative keywords.  This can be quite a lengthy process but is very much worth the work and time spent.

Here are a few negative keyword benefits:

• Increase your quality score – We all want a higher click-through-rate (CTR) and using negative keywords can dramatically increase your quality scores.
• Increase your click-through rate – By using negative keywords you will help eliminate irrelevant and costly impressions.
• Lower your conversion costs – This is vital to keeping your digital marketing campaign alive. When embarking on any SEO or digital marketing campaign you can lower your conversion costs when using Google AdWords with negative keywords so that your ads only show for searchers who are ‘actively’ looking for your product or service.

Negative keyword match types

It goes without saying that we all want to lower our digital marketing costs and get the highest return on investment possible.  Therefore, it’s essential to understand negative keywords match types so you can use them effectively.

Basically, there are three negative keyword match types, which are:

1. Exact match – This type of match gives you complete control and allows you to completely eliminate search engine queries that are not beneficial to your campaign. Remember to only use this type of negative keyword match when you don’t want a search query to show up with the exact same words.
2. Phrase match – Using this type of match allows you to match your negative keywords to exact phrases. If the words in a phrase are switched around then it won’t apply, so choose your phrases carefully.
3. Broad match – When using broad match type your negative keywords will be matched to many versions of the search phrase, not matter what word order the phrase is being used.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Remember when creating your digital marketing campaign that every click counts, and you pay for it.  So, focus on building your negative keywords and use them. For more information about how to use Google Ads for your business, consider doing the Digital School of Marketing’s Paid Advertising and Web Analytics Course. For more information about this and our other online digital marketing courses, please visit our website.