Archive for category Local Search Marketing Workshop

Just this morning, we sat in on a webinar titled, “PPC Negative Keywords: Maximizing the Positive Effect”.  It was hosted by Marin Software and Ken Jurina, the co-founder and CEO of of Epiar, Inc.  Here are some of the gems we plucked from our experience – some we know, but some of it was a kick in the pants to spend more time thinking negative.

Negative keywords instruct search engines to not display your ads, decreasing irrelevant queries, impressions and most importantly clicks and spend.

An interesting reverse logic idea that was mentioned: you may want to consider using negative keywords for legitimate terms.  Maybe these terms are spending a lot of money and bringing lots of traffic but they are expensive and converting poorly.  Other great reasons to use negative keywords are:

• Expensive conversions
• Expensive clicks
• Limited budget
• Bad brand association
• Not relevant for the user
• Quality improvements
• Lowering costs

An important, sometimes hard to find tidbit for each of the search engines is:  What are their negative keyword limits?

• With Google – 10,000 negative keywords in Ad Campaign or 5,000 at Ad Group Level
• With Yahoo – 250 negative keywords at Ad Campaign Level or Ad Group Level
  • Singular term covers plural and misspellings
• With Microsoft adCenter - 1024 character including spaces and commas
  • Campaign, ad group or keyword level

A major lesson seemed to be that ultimately, a combination of exact phrase broad and maximized negative keywords is the best way to target paid search.  Keep in mind that negative keywords have no impact on exact match terms.

So – I’m sold on the idea of switching to more broad and phrase matching and adding negative keywords to all of my accounts.  After adding broad and phrase match and negative keywords, what can I expect?

• Your ads will now appear on the relevant long tail phrases
• Your ads will get better exposure to better prospects, which means increased leads and increased revenue!
• You can now advertise on long tail phrases where your competitors dare not tread, meaning more cheap clicks for you without the dangers of broad match.
• Once your ads get impressions deep into the long tail phrases, your advertising reach may double, triple, or more!

OK – great, now how do I build these lists?  What tools are there for me to use?

Manually, using intuition and industry knowledge.

Scan through past referring phrases that did not convert, had bounce rates or were trash

• Google Search Query Report
• WordTracker
• Trellian’s Keyword Discovery
• Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Microsoft AdLabs Keyword Mutation Tool

So – In the end, negative keywords is a simple concept, important part of every campaign and can according, to today’s webinar, save up 20-40% on spend.  Wow, that’s a “no-brainer”.