There aren’t many things you can do to your AdWords campaigns that will impact your click-through-rate and the conversion rate on your site.  When you find one of these magical dimensions, you need to cherish it — regardless of how much harder it makes your work.  Negative keywords fall into this category and, until recently, could be difficult to manage across your account.

So what is a negative keyword?  Negative keywords prevent your ad from displaying for a search query and they can be added either on the ad group or campaign level.  For example if own a beachside pizza place and you are targeting the keyword “pizza in Fort Lauderdale”; your ad could display for these queries:

“Pizza in Fort Lauderdale”
“Pizza in Fort Lauderdale near the beach”
“Pizza in Fort Lauderdale near the Everglades”
“Worst pizza in fort Lauderdale”
“Free pizza in Fort Lauderdale”

As you can see, you may not want your ad to show for “worst” or “free” or for a geo-modifier like “Everglades”.  If you include these terms as negative keywords, then you’ll save yourself an impression, increase your click through rate and get more qualified prospects to your site.  Keywords like “free” and “worst” are easy examples of negatives; however, due diligence is required to ensure that you stay up to date with how people are searching today. 

Until this week, sharing negatives between campaigns could be a time consuming task that required a lot of exporting and importing, or copying and pasting.   Fortunately, the fine folks at Google have added a new tool to the “Control Panel and Library” section of AdWords!  “Negative Keyword Lists” is a new tool that lets you add negative keywords across your entire account!  Log-in and take a look.

If you have negatives and haven’t used it yet, try it out.   If you don’t have any negatives in your campaigns – consider adding them now!

If you’ve spent any time on Google’s help center for AdWords, you’ve come across the phrase, “tightly themed ad groups” at almost every turn.  Well maybe not every turn, but it’s peppered throughout any article, blog post, video, or forum that has anything to do with optimizing your AdWords campaigns. 

At almost every turn, Google implores you to construct your campaigns with the aforementioned “tightly themed ad groups” that contain a “few” keywords that are closely related to each other.   Unfortunately, you won’t come across any definitions for a “tightly themed ad group”.  So what is a “tightly themed ad group”, why is it important and how does it apply to your search marketing efforts?

Let’s start with a quick explanation of Quality Score, and a simple breakdown and explanation of how Google AdWords Accounts are structured:

Quality Score:  Simply put, the more often your ad gets clicked, the higher your quality score and the less you have to pay for your bid position. (There are a couple of other factors to Quality Score, but click through rate is the most important.)

AdWords account structure:

AdWords Account:  One account per company containing all of your campaigns, payment and billing information.

Campaigns: Up to 50 campaigns per account.  Targeting, ad delivery method, bid types, budgets and effective date ranges are controlled by the campaign.

Ad Groups: Up to 100 ad groups per campaign.  Ad groups are a collection of keywords that will trigger your ads; the amount you are willing to pay per click; the ads that will display when those keywords are used and the landing page on your website which will be displayed after your ad is clicked.

After digesting the above breakdown and reviewing the screen shot below of a Google search for “running shoes”; you may start to see the importance of ad groups that are organized with a few relevant keywords in each:  Ads should reflect the keywords that are being used. 

Got it yet?  No?  Remember Quality Score from above?  Let me break it down:  Take the keywords that you are targeting in the ad group and use them in your ad copy for that ad group.  When you do, the keyword used in the Google search will be bold in your ads on the Google results page.  The bold words will stand out.  Searchers will be drawn to the bold words in your ads and more likely to click on your ads as the bold text appears to be more relevant.  Your click-through-rate will increase; your quality score will increase and — most importantly — your cost-per-click will decrease and you will get more clicks for your budget!  Isn’t that easy? 

If you’ve resolved to get more from your AdWords efforts in 2011 but don’t know where to start, here’s a hint: CAMPAIGN SETTINGS.  You’ll want to log-in to your AdWords account, go the “Campaigns Tab” select “Settings” for “All Online Campaigns”; then follow these four quick settings tips to help you get more sales and leads in the New Year.

1. Location
   Location is exactly what it says it is.  It’s the geographic location that your ads are showing.  If you’re a pizza place in Fort Lauderdale and your targeting “All Locations” that means that someone in Bangladesh looking for a slice could see your ad.  Even if you deliver, crossing the International Date Line is probably out of the question.  If you do have prospects everywhere, run a “Geographic Report” and identify any countries, states, or territories that are not performing and exclude them from your targeting.
2. Language
   Another obvious column heading; this is the language setting of the users that you are targeting.  If you are running a Spanish campaign, make sure that the language matches the language of your ad copy, target audience and website landing pages.
3. Networks
   Here is one setting that is likely the most abused.  If you see campaigns with “ALL” then you are wrong!   Each campaign should target one of three things: Google, Google and Search Partners, or the Google Display Network.  (You could also break down the Google Display Network into Content Matched Sites or Targeted Placements but I’ll give you a pass if you are targeting both in a campaign.)   If you are mixing Search and Display, then stop what you are doing and break them out into two separate campaigns now.  Seriously, do it right now.
4. Ad Scheduling
   What a simple, straight-forward column heading.  Ad Scheduling is when your ads appear throughout the day.  If you’re not a 24-hour shop, people don’t wake in the middle of the night to search for what you sell, or you’re not open on the weekends, then you may want to consider scheduling your ads to appear when you are open or when people are converting.  How do you know if you get conversions on the weekends?  Simple, select a campaign, then select a tab, let’s say Ad Groups, then click on Segment and select “day of the week” and BOOM, all of your data is now segmented by the day of the week.  Do you get conversions on Sundays?  No.  Then click on Ad Scheduling and change your ad’s to run Monday to Saturday.  If you want to get more granular, use Google Analytics or your favorite analytics tool to get a feel for your ROI by the hour.  No conversions between 1:00 AM and 4:00 AM?  Back to Ad Scheduling to make sure you’re not spending any money when no one’s buying!

Campaign Settings are the foundation of your AdWords success or failure; however, these steps just scratch the surface of optimizing AdWords campaigns.  Start here and keep digging and 2011 will be a much better year!