How to Use Negative Keywords to Drive More Conversions

How to Use Negative Keywords to Drive More Conversions

Even if you’re new to digital marketing, you’ve almost certainly come across the concept of keywords. 

When it comes to anything from website content to PPC advertising campaigns, careful keyword selection ensures that your digital marketing efforts are found, noticed, and engaged with by the proper individuals. 

So, even if you don’t understand what negative keywords are, keep this in mind as we answer a crucial issue. 

What are Negative Keywords and How Do They Help?

Negative keywords in a PPC campaign, in contrast to standard keywords, filter out who may see and potentially interact with your ad. While your ad will still be targeted to the population you’ve selected, anyone searching for your negative keywords will not see it.

This can improve the success and conversion rate of your campaigns while also saving you money, as it reduces the chance of someone who isn’t interested in your product or service click on your ad. It also improves your ROAS (Return On Ad Spend), which makes sure that your advertising dollars go to the right campaigns and are spent wisely.

Consider a financial firm that specializes in providing loans for specific types of businesses, such as sole traders. They’d like to be found by traders, eCommerce store owners, and other types of businesses that’ll require SME loans, but not customers.

As a result, even if “business loans”, “SME loans”, and “online business” are all relevant to the business, the search query “personal loans” isn’t. As a result, a negative term can be “payday loan,” “mortgage,” and so on. 

Here’s why you should use negative keywords:

• Improve your conversion rate.
• Improve Click Through Rate (CTR).
• Attract more relevant viewers to your site.
• Save money
• Improve ROAS
• Improve the relevancy of your ad groups (Return On Ad Spend).

Negative Keywords Match Types

You can exclude negative keywords from your ads in various ways.

• Broad Match: A broad match excludes all words in a specific term or phrase, regardless of their order of appearance.
• Phrase Match: A phrase match excludes an exact phrase in the search, even if there are extra words before or after the keywords.
• Exact Match: An exact match excludes a specific phrase in a specific order.

Negative Keywords: How to Find Them

You can find keywords that have the most potential for you while also looking for phrases that are irrelevant to your site during your initial keyword research. Student loans aren’t necessary if you offer SME loans.

You can use Google to look up the top keywords in your industry and see if any negative terms pop up. You may also utilize the Google Search Term Report to assist you in better matching your keyword list to the intent of searchers. The report allows you to track the specific performance, conversions, and quality of specific keywords. You should monitor your results regularly to identify which keywords are generating impressions and delete those that aren’t.

Step 1. Create Your Negative List

To begin, you must first identify your negative keywords. Many of these are self-evident, but there are several tools like Wordtracker that allow you to acquire a more comprehensive list. You can also find your negative keywords in your Google AdWords account by looking at the Query Report.

Step 2: Format Your List

You must first format your negative keyword list for Google Ads. Place each phrase or keyword in square brackets and add a hyphen in front of each one. Using our SME loans as an example, the list of negative keywords would be as follows:

-[student loans]

-[mortgage loans]

-[personal loans]

-[payday loans]

Step 3. Add Your List To Google Ads

Under the top menu bar on your Google AdWords account dashboard, click Tools and Settings. Then, under Shared Library: click “Negative keyword lists.”

Select the blue addition symbol (+) to access the negative keyword page where you can enter your negative keywords:

Give your list a name and paste your keywords into the appropriate area. Click Save when you’re finished.

Finally, you have the option of using negative terms at the ad group level (where it affects all ads in the group) or campaign level (where it affects only specific campaigns).

Step 4: Review And Expand Your List Of Negative Keywords

It’s critical to analyze your PPC ads frequently, just like any other marketing strategy. It is generally advised that you check it at least once a week.

Simply go to Tools & Settings > Negative keyword lists in Google Ads to edit your negative keyword lists. Click on the plus symbol (+) to add new negative keywords to your list.

You should find ads that aren’t performing. This will allow you to expand your list of negative keywords and, as a result, create campaigns that are tailored to reach your target market.