Pay Per Click Marketing is, of course, about relevance. Not only choosing the most relevant keywords for your products & services, but also making sure that the wrong keywords don’t trigger your Ads to show. The solution: Negative Keywords (or Excluded Keywords for Yahoo!)
By choosing the right negative keywords you can dramitically reduce unwanted Ad impressions – the maths of which are important to understand.
Let’s imagine that you have no negative keywords at all & your group of keywords gets 10,000 impressions in a day. You get 200 clicks. Your CTR% is 2%
By adding the right list of negative keywords, you might potentially reduce those impressions to 5,000. But because these were (hopefully) all unwanted, you haven’t changed the number of clicks. So still 200 per day. Now your CTR is 4% – a nice increase.
That won’t halve your cost per click (CPC) anymore (it used to be that simple, not any more!) but a CTR% that’s twice as good will certainly improve your Quality Score & reduce your costs over time.
If you need inspiration (or just time saving) Andy Komack has a great list to get you started here:
http://www.komarketingassociates.com/blog/200-plus-negative-keywords-to-consider-for-b2b-ppc/
(also read the comments for a few more useful suggestions)
More info at the Google Help Centre is here:
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=14791&query=negative&topic=&type=f&%20onclick=
Have you recently added negative keywords to your account? Want to share the results?
