We’ve recently taken on a number of PPC accounts for our clients that have previously been run by other agencies and I’ve noticed that a lot of the campaigns were not using negative keywords. A lot of PPC companies charge a management fee percentage based on your Google Adwords budget. With a budget percentage model the more you spend each month, the better for the agency running your campaign regardless of whether traffic is less targeted in order for the monthly budget to be used up.
Negative keywords are fundemetal for any successful pay per click campaign and this blog will explain firstly what they are and then why they are so important.
What is a Negative Keyword
A negative keyword is a keyword matching option that will not trigger your ads for any search queries containing that term.
If your goal is to find qualified leads, negative keywords will help filter out some of the traffic that you do not want. For example, if you want to promote ‘Dental Implants’, but you don’t offer them on the NHS, you can add ‘NHS’ as a negative keyword. Therefore your ad will not be shown to a searcher looking for ‘NHS Dental implants’.
Negative keywords can be added at two different levels, at a campaign level and at an Ad Group level.
Benefits of Negative Keywords
1. Your ad will not show for search queries that are not relevant to your target market.
2. There will be fewer clicks that do not convert into leads or sales.
3. Your account’s overall Click Through Rate (CTR) will be higher because your ad will not be triggered for irrelevant search queries, causing your total number of impressions to fall and thus causing your CTR to improve.
4. A higher CTR will cause your ad to get a higher Ad Rank through better Quality Score
5. Improved Quality Score helps decrease Cost Per Click (CPC).
6. With a lower CPC, your campaigns will receive more daily clicks which will increase targeted traffic to your site
7. An increase in quality traffic going to your website can potentially improve your conversion numbers
8. Improved conversion numbers can increase the ROI of your Google AdWords Campaign.
As a starting point – here is a list of negative keywords that we generally add to each of our campaigns to ensure that the traffic directed to a client’s landing page is more targeted and has a higher chance to convert.
• Free
• Review
• Information
• How
• Define
• Job
• NHS (if you aren’t an NHS practice)
• History
• Example
• Samples
• What are
• What Is
• Books
• Career
• Courses
• Education
Obviously these may not all be relevant for different campaigns, and when setting up a new account we would tailor the negative keywords for that particular one. These types of negative keywords will produce better quality traffic and increase the chance of the campaign being a success.
Our PPC team here at Dental Design are all Google Adwords professionals and have experience running dental specific Adwords campaigns. We know what it takes to get return on investment – call us on 01202 677 277 or you can email [email protected] if you want some more information on the PPC service we can offer.
p.s we are currently offering 50% off our usual PPC setup fee and throwing in £75 of free adwords advertising for every new account setup – offer ends on the 31st of January!