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Negatives Into Positives: How to Use Negative Keywords in Ads

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Paid advertising offers a wonderful solution to increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and producing more revenue for your business, but it doesn’t guarantee fantastic results. To develop a successful strategic campaign, you shouldn’t just include keywords that will generate more conversions—it’s also vital to list keywords you don’t want to be shown for.

When it comes to paid search, it’s crucial to determine your most profitable keywords and create relevant ad groups, but these aren’t the only things you should focus on! Although these tactics allow you to find potential customers searching for similar products or services like yours, these aren’t the only things Google ads manage to find.

If there’s anything that can waste the money you’ve invested in Google ads, it’s irrelevant searchers. There’s no use advertising to an audience that certainly won’t be interested in your offerings. Google ads already cost a fortune; what more if you have to pay for clicks that never return on your investment?

To avoid wasting your time and money on clicks that won’t convert, you must identify your negative keywords!

Maximising Ad Success With Negative Keywords

It goes without saying that your ads must include keywords that will generate more conversions. However, there will be keywords that you don’t want your ad to be shown for in some cases. This may seem harmless, but it will waste a lot of your money and effort if it happens more often!

To prevent suffering from low CTR and clicks that don’t convert, you must invest a few hours of research into identifying your negative keywords. Negative keywords are the opposite of keywords—they are words and phrases used to prevent your ads from showing to audiences who have search queries that are unrelated to your product or service.

Negative keywords help generate conversions and actively build your customer base by tightening the relevance of your ad groups. In entering your negative keywords, one ad will be able to speak to an entire set of keywords, increasing the chances of your target audience clicking on your ad and converting to paying customers.

Identifying Negative Keywords

To avoid your ads showing for unrelated search queries, you must first determine which words and phrases should be included in your negative keywords list. Negative keywords can be identified in several various ways:

During the Initial Keywords Research Stage

Conducting keyword research isn’t just to understand the language of your target audience when searching for your product or service; it’s also an essential step in identifying your negative keywords. While analysing, comparing, and prioritising the best keywords to target, you can simultaneously pick out which terms should be considered negative keywords. 

Manual Search

To help you spot any terms you want to avoid, consider running a quick Google search of the top ten keywords you’re advertising. If you see any unrelated words in search results that come up during your Google search, make sure to add them to your negative keyword list.

Google Ads Search Terms Report

Another way to identify keywords is to utilise search term reports on Google Ads. The search terms of your campaign should be reviewed and analysed regularly to ensure your ads aren’t showing for irrelevant searches and wasting money on clicks.

Conclusion

Your keywords are crucial to having a successful ad campaign, but you mustn’t forget about negative keywords! Negative keywords are just as essential—they can improve your ad performance and increase the chances of more conversions and profit. Make sure to work with a reputable digital marketing agency to help you with your negative keywords list for improved ad performance.

If you’re looking for the best digital marketing agency in Melbourne to help you with Google and Facebook ad campaigns, you’ve come to the right place! Here at Relevant Digital, we care about our clients’ success and believe we shouldn’t be paid unless our client is making money and seeing the benefits of our services. Join our waitlist today!