Did you know that Google allows you to bid on Negative keywords as well? This can help you out tremendously if you do your research. For example, if I were promoting a digital product, like a “learn to sing” course, I would probably want to remove certain types of visitors from my website. You can do this two ways, you could qualify your visitors with very relevant ads (sometimes by adding the price of the product to the ad) or you could register negative keywords with your advertising campaign. These are some visitors I frequently remove from a digital product’s campaign:
- iso
- cheat
- free
- p2p
- serial
- key
- warez
- crack
- hack
- password
- cracked
- keygen
- torrent
All of the above keywords relate to illegal ways of obtaining a digital product, and I know through my research that promoting to these people are a complete waste of money because they are most likely not interested in buying the product. The benefit to using negative keywords is that you increase your Click-Through Rate (CTR) and you lower your Cost Per Click (CPC) because you are removing visitors that are not relevant to your business. If you were to simply qualify your visitors, your CTR would be decreased, so you actually end up saving money instantly.
You also want to use negative keywords when bidding on phrases that can have other meanings. For example, if you’re bidding on “houses”, you may want to remove some of the following:
- doll (for doll houses)
- half way (for half way houses)
- dog (for dog houses)
Does this make sense? Look at how much money you could save if you removed your ad from searches that didn’t relate to your business.
