Guess What? Negative Keywords in AdWords Just Got Easier!

Theo Bennett - January 19, 2011

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!