Negative keywords are those keywords that digital marketers use to prevent their ads from being shown in irrelevant searches. There can be instances when your ads might appear when your target audience is searching for some other keywords. There is where you can create a negative keyword list to exclude irrelevant search terms and let you focus on more relevant keywords. In this blog, let us dive deep into understanding negative keywords and how to use them effectively.

What Are Negative Keywords and Its Importance?

Negative keywords are essential to focusing on what you want to showcase to your target audience and avoiding your ads appearing for irrelevant searches. By effectively targeting negative keywords, you can save money, improve your quality score, and boost your conversion rates.

• Saves You Money: The search advertising or ad campaigns work on PPC. PPC is pay-per-click, which means that every click costs you money. If your audience lands on irrelevant clicks, it can waste your money. But with the use of negative keywords, you can save money as it prevents your audience from clicking on irrelevant ads.
• Improves Keyword Targeting and Ad Performance: When you filter out irrelevant search queries through negative keywords, it ensures you are targeting the right people. And when your ads are shown to the most relevant people, chances are that it leads to better ad performance.
• Helps Boost Your Quality Score: Quality score is a Google metric measuring your ads’ relevance and quality. Using these keywords helps improve your click-through rate (CTR), improving your quality score.
• More Clicks-More Conversions: Negative keywords help expose your brand to more relevant people, which helps generate more clicks. Reducing the number of irrelevant clicks and targeting more relevant clicks leads to more conversions for your business.
• Builds and Protects Your Brand Image: It becomes natural to use negative keywords when you do not want to associate your brand with irrelevant terms. Using these keywords, you focus on terms more associated with your business.

About Negative Keywords List: How It Works?

A negative keywords list is simply a list of keywords that you create to include terms you do not want to appear in your ads. Creating a keywords list will allow you to manage keywords across various ad campaigns easily. Now, let us understand how it works.

Now, there can be many terms that sound relevant to your brand but are irrelevant when it comes to promoting your niche. For instance, if you, as a business, sell luxury watches and use keywords like “luxury watches” or “designer watches,” you may notice that your ads might show up for keywords like “cheap watches,” which are not relevant to your business.

So, now you will create a list of negative keywords that sound irrelevant to what you sell. Rather than running individual campaigns, you can create a negative keyword list to make it easier for your multiple ad campaigns. For example, for your luxury watches business, you can create a list of  keywords like- “sale,” “discount,” “cheap,” and “free.”

How to Use Negative Keywords

So, now that you know that negative keywords can offer you numerous benefits, it’s time for us to understand how to use them. The following are the steps:

• Start your search for negative keywords by using the ‘Search Terms Report’ in your Google Ads Account. This search report allows you to see every search that triggered your ads and spot the irrelevant terms.
• Now, spot the terms that are not relevant to what your business offers. You can also look for terms with low conversion rates and engagement metrics.
• After identifying the potential negative keywords, add them to your groups or ad campaigns.
• Lastly, you just need to monitor the performance regularly and keep updating as required. You also need to make sure that you keep track of conversion rates and CTR to see if adding negative keywords land you better campaign performance for your ads.

Wrapping Up

Negative keywords are crucial when you want to focus on high-quality conversions for your business. Obviously, you would never want to burn your costs on ads that won’t gain you leads. Adding these keywords to your ad campaigns helps build your quality score, improve ad performance, and save money. So, next time you run your ad campaigns, make sure to focus and create a list of  keywords. If you need help with using keywords in your business campaigns, you can contact our SEO Consultants.