It is no secret that running a succesful AdWords campaign requires plenty of time and effort.  In the early stages, keyword research is done in order to discover which terms see the most traffic, and which are most likely to convert users to buyers.  The search engine marketer wants to make sure that their ads appear for as many relevant queries that they can afford, while filtering out any queries that might be from a user that’s not in “buy” mode.  For many online marketers, a great tool to apply this filter is through negative keywords.

With an ever growing number of companies moving from traditional advertising methods to online methods like Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and others, each individual niche has become more crowded with competition.  More competition equates to a lower click through rate, higher cost per click, and worst of all, a shrinking return on investment.  To offset this it may be tempting to search for more new keywords to advertise on, but instead, it might actually be a good idea to start by limiting you presence with some negative keyword research.

The first, and simplest, way to research for negative keywords is to simply plug some of your targeted phrases into Google, and take a look through the results.  Take note of any keyword or keyword phrase that you see that does not apply exactly to what it is you’re offering.   For instance, because Groove Commerce is not an eCommerce hosting company, we include “hosting” and all of its other forms in our negative keywords.  Groove Commerce doesn’t really provide reviews to the consumer either, so words like “review” or “comparison” would also be negative.  Additionally, many eCommerce sites would want to consider “free” and similar words as negatives.

AdWords provides reporting that is also very useful for weeding out negative phrases.  You can create a report by heading to the Reports tab from anywhere within your AdWords account.  Here you’ll find quite a few different reports to generate:

For negative keyword research, we’ll want to run a “Search Query Performance” report, but take a look at some of the other reports available, as they can all be quite useful.

Now you can choose some of the settings for the report, including the date range, level of detail, and other options.  If you’d like, you can save the report and have it run automatically at set times.  Click “Create Report” when you’re finished, and depending on the size of your campaign, you should be able to view your report within a couple of minutes.

Once that report is ready, open it up.  For negative keyword research, I like to sort by putting the lowest CTR queries at the top, but conversion rate is another good bet.  Take a look down that “Search Query” column, and take note of any terms that don’t quite apply to whatever it is that you’re offering.

With negative keywords, you do want to be particularly careful.  You don’t want to keep your ad from showing on any query that could lead to a sale.  The safest way to implement negatives is in batches, with close monitoring over the following few days.  There are some advanced tactics when dealing with negative keywords, such as the different match types (broad, phrase, and exact), but we’ll save that for a later blog post.  For now, go make sure your ads are showing only when you want them to!