When you work with Google Ads advertising on a daily basis, you quickly realise that you need to keep a close eye on both spend and costs.
Perhaps you have experienced getting traffic from search terms that are not particularly relevant to your business – even though you have set up some good keywords?
You are probably aware that not every consumer is valuable for your business. Many are specifically searching for a particular brand or a specific product that may not match what you offer. If the chance of a sale here is minimal, it makes good sense to try to avoid showing your ads to these consumers.
Google Ads has a clever feature for exactly this: negative keywords
In the following, I will explain what negative keywords are and give you some practical tips on how to avoid wasting too much of your Google Ads budget on consumers who are not relevant to you.
There are certainly also situations where you should consider not using negative keywords, and I will cover those further down in the post.
What are negative keywords?
Negative keywords give you the option to prevent your Google Ads from appearing when a user searches for something that is not relevant to your business.
To give a simple example, a Google search for “fire engine toy” could trigger your ad for real “fire engines” if your ad is not set up correctly. This is where negative keywords come in.
By using “toy” as a negative keyword, your ad will not show for search terms containing that keyword.
What are typical negative keywords?
If you run a webshop, you will often find the following keywords useful as negatives:
- used
- free
- dba
- loan
- rent
- demo
- cheap
By using these as negative keywords, you will avoid getting a lot of traffic from users who are simply looking for a cheap, used product in the same category as the one you sell.
Benefits of adding negative keywords:
– Your budget is used more efficiently.
– You attract more of the right customers to your website.
– Your conversion rate will increase (meaning more visitors will end up making a purchase).
How do I add negative keywords?
Right from the moment you set up your Google Ads account, it is a good idea to consider which negative keywords you might want to use.
Always keep the following in mind:
- Which brands do you want to avoid being associated with?
- Which quality descriptors do you want to avoid: cheap, used, rent, lease, etc.
- Which industry are you targeting? For example, is ‘Golf’ about sport or cars?
- Is your business B2B or B2C?
Choosing your negative keywords requires careful consideration, as they are used to exclude a part of the market.
Often, keywords like “cheap” are selected as negatives if you believe the product you are selling is of high quality. However, what is considered cheap can vary from person to person, and you might still be able to capture part of this market by offering rental, leasing, or other attractive financing options.
If, for example, you want to prevent your ad from showing for the keywords “cheap toy fire engine” (because of the word cheap and only for those products), it is important to be precise when setting “cheap toy fire engine” as a negative keyword. Otherwise, you risk your ad not being shown for searches like “toy fire engine” as well.
Set “cheap toy fire engine” as a negative keyword with [exact match] – see the image below. Alternatively, you can set “cheap” as a negative keyword for the ad group you have selected.
How do I find negative keywords?
An online search can quickly provide you with long and topic-specific lists (often in English). However, these can be a bit overwhelming and require careful review.
Alternatively, you may know from experience which terms your customers associate with your business, but which are not actually relevant for you.
If you have been running Google Ads for a while, you can use the Search terms feature in Google Ads to find out what users have typed before clicking your ad – see the image below.
Here, you can easily highlight a search term and add it as a negative keyword.
Tip:
If you see in Search terms that a user has searched for “cheap red Volvo fire engine toy”, which is not relevant for you, you can of course add the entire phrase as a negative keyword.
Alternatively, you can specify “Volvo” as a negative keyword. In this way, you cover many possible variations of searches for Volvo fire engines.
You do this under Shared library in Google Ads:
I have a limited budget; can negative keywords help me?
In this situation, it is especially important to identify as many negative keywords as possible from the start.
You could simply start adding lots of negative keywords in Google Ads. However, this can quickly become unmanageable.
Instead, you should use the sales funnel as a starting point, as this can give you inspiration for when in the customer journey you want your ads to appear. At the top – Awareness – where potential customers are just searching for information about products/services, you can limit your ad spend by avoiding searches containing terms like “demo”, “test”, or “reviews”.
If, on the other hand, you have a great guide on how to choose the best product in your category, you should not select the above phrases as negative keywords.
Further down the funnel, where users are making their decision, you may want to avoid certain types of customers who often cause a lot of hassle. Negative keywords here could include “discount”, “cheap”, “dba”, “free delivery”.
I have plenty of budget; should I use negative keywords?
In this case, you can afford to be more flexible. Try starting without negative keywords and see what happens. It can be very insightful to see which keywords your potential customers are actually using.
However, you should keep an eye on your spend and ideally check it daily, as campaigns without negative keywords can quickly eat up your budget (hopefully, you have set a daily spend cap – if so, well done).
Afterwards, you can regularly check ‘Search terms’ in Google Ads and see which keywords are not generating conversions/sales or seem irrelevant.
It is a hassle to use negative keywords and takes time to set up
You might be thinking, can I just skip it or take a shortcut?
…“no” is the short answer … but actually:
If you have a very limited budget, you can choose to set the keywords that trigger your ads as [exact match]. For example, you can choose the keyword [fire engine toy], and then you will (almost) only have your ads shown when a potential customer searches precisely for fire engine toy and not, for example, used fire engine toy.
Google can still be extra creative and show your ads anyway, but the number of impressions is greatly reduced.
Conclusion:
Although negative keywords are often a good idea, it is not always a feature you must use.
Are you missing traffic, or have you lost a lot of traffic after adding a negative keyword?
Then consider removing it from your negative keyword list to regain those impressions.
Make a note of when you make the change and monitor how your sales develop overall.
Keep an eye on ‘Search terms’ and see if they might actually generate sales/conversions.
As always, it is crucial to understand your customers’ behaviour. When you know how and how long a customer spends searching for information before making a purchase, you can more easily decide whether a keyword should be set as negative or not.
It might be that customers first search and click on your ad, and then call you. In that case, it would be a shame to exclude a keyword that brings a lot of traffic but does not immediately convert.
Tip:
If your best keyword has a double meaning and you cannot simply set it as negative, spend extra time on your ad copy to clearly signal who you are targeting and what your product offers.
Other relevant articles:
How to do keyword research
Google launches better split testing options
