47. What are Negative Keywords in AdWords Campaigns?


There are Keywords and there are Negative keywords in adwords, Keywords are the primary targeting tool where as negative keywords are those that help you establish higher relevancy by ensuring that your ads do not show up on broad irrelevant keywords. They are important in building a successful target keyword list for your google adwords campaigns.

Adding negative keywords in your AdWords campaigns ensures that your ad does not appear on search queries containing that keyword. Creating a negative keyword list allows you to reach the most appropriate search users. In effect only high relevancy queries trigger your ad impressions and thus higher likelihood of reaching an audience that is likely to convert faster.

On the business and ROI side when Search Engine Marketing is a large component of the Internet Marketing budgets, negative keywords help you reduce money wastage on unwanted impressions and clicks from searches that might have your keyword as part of a search term but something that not relevant. For e.g you are an affiliate selling mobile applications, you surely do not want your ad showing up on “free mobile apps”.

Google AdWords and other PPC search platforms like Bing / Yahoo offer lower bids for ads that have high relevance to the search users queries. This helps the search engines and the advertisers. Higher click through rates are lead to better Quality Scores and in effect a better campaign.

So next time you are about to advertise on google or appointing a PPC / Adwords campaign management agency make sure you have a good list of negative keywords in your account.