Become an Adwords Negative Keyword Master

When using Google Adwords, one must master their understanding of negative keywords to reduce to the greatest possible extent wasted clicks and expense. Additional benefits to focusing on negative keywords are a lower bounce rate (a factor in Google’s deciding your search engine ranking. Low bounce rates = higher search engine results) and longer time on site by your visitors (another factor known to be measured by Google in ranking pages. Longer time on site = better search engine rankings).

The use of negative keywords is critical.

Glossary:

Positive keywords: Words you WANT people use to find your product or services and desire to traffic them to your site as they will likely induce them to buy or partake in your service

Negative keywords: Words you want to AVOID which do not represent or fit your product well and are not worth paying for the traffic as they will likely not be interested and will leave without partaking or purchasing your product or service.

Bounce: Someone who comes to your site (either paid or organic) and does not navigate away from the first page visited before leaving the site.

The strategy

Achieving an aggressive ROI on your Adwords investment comes down to managing and analyzing your clicks, what people were typing into the search bar, what they clicked on and whether or not they stayed on the site, interacted and hopefully transacted (this could be monetary purchases in the case of an e-Store or downloads/newsletter subscribes in the case of a blog) bringing you revenue in some form.

Fine tuning with negative keywords, focus on bounces

When you first begin your Adwords campaigns you will focus primarily on positive keywords to drive traffic. Once your campaigns are running and you are getting clicks to your site, you will want to begin analyzing those clicks to determine which were good clicks and which were not. The fastest and easiest way to determine which clicks were bad or undesirable is to focus on bounces that originated from your paid clicks.

Setting up Google Analytics to report bounces easily

Follow these tutorials to get your Analytics set up and add negative keywords to your Adwords campaigns and ad groups.

Check and manage daily

Now that you have a quick and easy dashboard in Analytics, you can quickly assess which Adwords generated clicks are resulting in a 100% (or higher than average) bounce rate and make an assessment about adding negative keywords to the related ad campaign or group in Adwords.

This strategy when used often will most surely reduce your wasted expenses on ad clicks and allow you to focus on better user experience, content and conversions.