All you need to do is combine the perfect keywords in your paid search campaigns with a great quality score and you’ll be rewarded with a number one rank and limitless clicks for your ads.
Right?
Ah, if only it were that simple.
If you want to beat your competitors and find the prospects that are most likely to turn into actual sales, you also need to include negative keywords in your Google Ads campaigns.
What Are Negative Keywords?
Negative Keywords help you filter out the searches you don’t need or want to pay for. Negative keywords help qualify your leads by eliminating searches that don’t make sense for you. They let Google and other search engines know that some queries aren’t relevant to your company or its products and services.
Examples of Negative Keywords
For example, while you may want to attract someone who types a query for product X, you definitely don’t want searchers looking for “free” product X. And if you’re advertising your products, and not your company, you’d probably want to include words like “career,” “employment,” “hiring.” You don’t want employees right now, you want sales.
Let’s say your company is actually a school. You teach truck drivers on big rigs. Ideally, a future student would use long tail keywords in their search like “truck driving schools in my state” and a match made in heaven—or Google—could begin. But if truck is your keyword and you neglect to add negative keywords like rental, custom, purchase, instead of finding students, you’ll find people looking to rent, customize and buy trucks. Same goes for the word “online” as you’re unlikely to teach a future big-rigger how to drive on a computer. Paying for the wrong keywords can be very expensive. After all, you’re paying for those precious clicks.
Save Money with Negative Keywords
Use negative keywords in your ad campaigns to qualify your leads and save you money. Filter out terms where you don’t want your ads to appear to ensure that the clicks you get—and pay for—are more likely to be those that really matter to you.
Negative keywords can also save you money by creating more relevant keyword groups that yield higher click-through-rates (CTR). That relevance is viewed favorably by Google and can increase your quality score. Your quality score is tabulated by search engine algorithms and considers multiple factors including CRT, ad text relevance, relevance of keywords to their ad group and the overall performance of your ad account. And the higher your quality score, the lower your overall costs.
If you’d like to learn more about running effective Google Ads campaigns that help turn prospects into sales, contact the experts at CloudControlMedia and we’ll show you how.