I Know You Are, But What Am I? Negative Keywords and You

Have you ever looked around and suddenly realized that wherever you are just isn’t your scene? Ever wonder how you got there? You had an unclouded destination in mind, so this is a bit puzzling. Maybe a wrong turn looked like the correct way to go, and now you’re squeezed next to the opposite of where you thought you’d be. If this sounds familiar in terms of your marketing strategy, that is because you might need to find a use for negative keywords.

The Positive Side of Negative Keywords

Having a grasp on the use of negative keywords benefits your brand in a few ways:

·         Your pay-per-click costs remain efficient by restricting ads to targeted audiences

·         Appropriate traffic to your websites will improve your Quality Score

·         Optimized web traffic leads to more conversions

·         Your brand stays visible in the correct niche

Put simply by Semrush, negative keywords make designations about what your brand or products are not, so your ads aren’t shown in places where your audience isn’t. If that still sounds confusing, try thinking of it like this: HiFi Insight provides marketing and competitive intelligence and does not repair stereo equipment. A negative keyword to use in this instance would be “audio” to keep marketing intelligence ads from showing up when people search for “HiFi audio insights”. The goal of this negative keyword is to keep your unintended audiences separate from your targeted audience to reduce wasted ad-spend.

The Negative Semantics

            Google Ads has three levels of negative keyword settings, all of which have their own sensitivity to triggering a bid for an ad. They are: Negative Broad Match, Negative Phrase Match, and Negative Exact Match.

·         Negative Broad Match doesn’t care about the order of the words searched, just that the search terms include all the keywords. It’s still possible to show an ad if the search includes only some of the negative keywords.

·         Negative Phrase Match cares about the order of negative keywords. Negative Phrase Match doesn’t trigger an ad when a specific phrase is searched, or if terms are entered in front of or following the phrase. An ad could still show if the negative keywords are entered out of order, though.

·         Negative Exact Match is as it sounds – the keywords must be in the same order, be the same words, and unlike Negative Phrase Match, no extra words can be present, or an ad has a chance to be triggered.

The tiered way this works allows the user to decide how strict of a search term is required to show an ad.

In addition to setting Match criteria, Google Ads allows users to set negative keywords up on distinct levels of accounts and campaigns. You can apply negative keywords to the entirety of an account, which will apply the settings to all campaigns and all groups of ads associated with an account. This is a broad-stroke application and will keep your brand safe from general mismatches. Drilling deeper, a user can apply another set of negative keywords to specific campaigns. This allows flexibility in setting up negative keywords, especially for brands or businesses that are running more than one campaign. Perhaps keywords that are appropriate for one campaign such as “promotion” or “sale” are not appropriate for a similar but categorically separate run of ads.

This same concept is applicable all the way down to individual groups of ads. The logic remains the same, that some negative keywords are appropriate for certain ads and not appropriate for others, even among the same campaign.

Getting Something from Nothing

Google Ads has its own negative keyword finding tools. A user can manually search through keywords triggering ads to find the costly, irrelevant search terms that are triggering ads and make them negative keywords. This analysis works, but unfortunately, it’s post-mortem for whatever chunk of your budget has already been spent on these keywords.

Google Ads provides a proactive method of using negative keywords that should stave off parasitic keywords from draining your budget ahead of time, given you do some research first. You can set up negative keyword lists and apply them to your account, campaign, or ad groups which keeps future inappropriate searches from encroaching your reach.

Despite the helpful aspects of learning to use negative keywords, there are a few limitations. First, Google Ads only counts the first 16 keywords in a search. If your negative keyword falls on the 17th word, it is likely your ad will be shown even though you’ve included it in the list of negative keywords. A 17-word search term is unlikely, though, right? That user might not even know exactly what they are looking for, but it can happen. Secondly, most symbols and search operators are ignored and may change the likelihood your ads will be shown. And third, using too many negative keywords can work against you and limit the size of your reach instead of getting you in front of the right audience.  

HiFi Insight Helps

To wrap up thinking about negative keywords, they are an indispensable component of a marketing campaign, especially if competition is high and brand differentiation is exceedingly crucial. Negative keywords help to carve out space around your competitors so you can make strides toward your goal, unimpeded. Essentially, negative keywords answer the age-old question of “I know you are, but what am I?”.

HiFi Insight is equipped to help answer this question, configure brand differentiators, and avoid that unneeded identity crisis that drains bank accounts for ad-spend. Fill out a contact form on our website to start the process of acquiring services today.