PPC in Internet Marketing: Using Negative Keywords
By Kenneth S. Sumerford, MBA
October 2009
It is especially important for you to understand the power of specifying negative keywords when you are using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to promote your business. First of all, you should be exceptionally familiar with the product you are marketing, whether it is your own or an affiliate product. If you know the target audience of your product, then you can start to list some negative qualifiers that may not include the people you want to click on your ad.
For example, if you are promoting auto insurance, then it makes sense to list some negative keywords such as boat, motorcycle, RV, etc. You do not want to waste your ad budget on people who are going to be looking for something which you do not offer.
Let's take a look at another example. If you are selling DVDs of movies, then you might want to filter out keywords or phrases where people are searching for photos of actors and actresses. In this case, the negative keywords could be "photos", "pictures", and "images".
From time to time, you should take a close look at your website log files. When you go through the search terms that visitors use to arrive at your site, you can get a good idea of some of the keywords that you should be using as negative keywords. You can do this if you are using an analytics program such as Google Analytics, or if you have AwStats installed on your web server.
A few other negative qualifiers include age group, locations and price. Think about your target market. If you are targeting adults, your negative keywords should include "teens", "children", "kids" and "babies". You may also screen out certain states where your product is not offered. Furthermore, if you are not giving away free samples, be sure to use "free" as one of your negative keywords.
Another good method to come up with negative keywords is to use the Google External Keyword Tool. Enter your seed keyword into the tool and it will return a list of phrases including your keyword as well as possible related keywords. Scan through the list to identify ones that you may include in your negative keyword list.
The three main PPC advertising platforms - Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter - all provide a way for you to specify negative keywords. Make sure you use this feature. It will go a long way to saving you money on your ad campaigns.
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