How to Use Negative Keywords to Improve Your Google Ads Performance
To use negative keywords effectively in Google Ads and improve your campaign’s performance, follow these steps:
Keyword Research: Conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant keywords for your campaign. This will help you understand the terms that users are searching for and determine which keywords are not relevant to your business or target audience.
Identify Irrelevant Keywords: Review your search term reports regularly to identify keywords that are triggering your ads but aren’t relevant to your offerings. These irrelevant keywords could be consuming your budget and generating low-quality clicks. Make a list of these keywords to add them as negative keywords.
Add Negative Keywords: In your Google Ads account, navigate to the “Keywords” tab and select the appropriate campaign or ad group. Click on “Negative Keywords” and add the identified irrelevant keywords to the list. This ensures that your ads won’t be shown when users search for those specific terms.
Match Types: Determine the match types for your negative keywords. There are three match types available for negative keywords in Google Ads: broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Broad match will exclude any search term that contains all the words in any order, phrase match will exclude search terms that contain the complete phrase, and exact match will only exclude the exact search term you specify.
Regular Review and Refinement: Continuously monitor your campaign’s search term reports to identify new irrelevant keywords. Add these keywords as negative keywords to prevent wasteful spending. Similarly, review your negative keyword list periodically and remove any keywords that may have become relevant over time.
Use Campaign-Level Negative Keywords: If you have keywords that are irrelevant to all your ad groups within a campaign, it’s more efficient to add them as campaign-level negative keywords. This ensures they are excluded from triggering any of the ad groups’ ads within that campaign.
Consider Keyword Variations: Think about variations or misspellings of your negative keywords that may still be irrelevant to your campaign. For example, if “free” is a negative keyword, you may also want to add “fr” or “fre” as negative variations.
Use Tools and Reports: Take advantage of Google Ads tools and reports that can assist you in identifying negative keywords. The Search Terms report, Keyword Planner, and other third-party keyword research tools can provide insights into relevant and irrelevant keywords.
Test and Optimize: Continuously test your campaigns and evaluate their performance. Adjust your negative keyword list as needed to improve your ads’ relevancy and increase your return on investment (ROI).
By effectively using negative keywords in your Google Ads campaigns, you can reduce unwanted clicks, improve your click-through rate (CTR), increase your ad’s relevancy, and ultimately achieve better performance and results.
source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-use-negative-keywords-improve-your-google-ads-performance-jain/
