Chapter Five

Narrow Your Focus Some More

By Ben Hart

Negative Keywords

Google allows you to select what it calls “negative keywords” for your ads.  That means if someone types one of your “negative” keywords into Google, your ad will not be shown even if the rest of the phrase is an “exact keyword match.”

For example, you might want to select the word “free” as one of your negative keywords.

Many on the Internet only want to grab free stuff, but will never buy anything from you.  So they will click on my ads offering a free book if they see it. 

By selecting “free” as one of my negative keywords, my ads will not show for anyone who uses the word “free” in their keyword search.

If you are selling only new cars, you will want to select “used” as one of your negative keywords.  You don’t want clicks from people who are looking for used cars if you are selling only new cars. 

If you are selling only certain models of cars, you will want to list all other models of cars as negative keywords.

If you are selling sneakers, but don’t carry red sneakers, you might select “red” as one of your negative keywords.

Spend a lot of time on negative keywords – especially if you are using “Broad Match” or “Phrase Match” as your keyword match option.

This is not important if you are limiting all search to just “exact match.”

But you should have negative keywords if you have selected “Phrase Match” as one of your options, and certainly for “Broad Match.”  “Phrase Match” requires an exact keyword match within a phrase a searcher is typing.  So if “cars” is the keyword you’ve selected, your ad will show for “used cars” if you’ve selected “Phrase Match,” but it would not show under “Exact Match.”

So having a potentially big list of negative keywords is essential to maximizing the traffic you want and minimizing the traffic you don’t want if you select “Phrase Match” or “Exact Match” as you keyword matching options.

For your negative keywords, just select the “Add Keywords” tab for your ad and put a minus (-) sign before the word in your keyword list, so your negative words will look like this: 

-free

-red

-cheap

-discount

Again, a big part of successful marketing is weeding out those you should not be marketing to . . . because these empty clicks just cost you money.

Scheduling Your Ads

You will find you get different kinds of people at night than during the day; and different kinds of people on weekends than during the week.  Your cost to get a lead or a buyer will also fluctuate depending on the time of day and the day of the week.

In the “Campaign Settings” section, Google allows you to schedule when your ad is shown.

This further improves your ROI by ensuring that your ads run when it makes the most business sense. For example, if you are a local business, you might want your ads running only during business hours.  

You can even tell Google to automatically modify your bids based on time-of-day and day-of-week.  So if you are an online retailer, for example, you might want your ads ranking near the top of  the first page on Google’s search results list during busiest hours for online shopping – such as lunchtime. 

Key Tip When Not Using “Exact Match”

If you have “Broad Match” turned on, and one of your keyword phrases is, say, “red sleds”, list the phrase this way for your ad:

 red sleds

[red sleds]

“red sleds”

Why?

Because brackets [ ] around keywords mean “Exact Match.”  Quotes around keywords mean “Phrase Match.”

Even if you have “Broad Match” turned on, Google will rank your ad higher for a keyword phrase if it sees “Exact Match” for a phrase.  Google places more value on “Exact Match” than “Broad Match” or “Phrase Match” when deciding to deliver an ad to a searcher.

So if you are using “Broad Match,” be sure also to include the phrase in brackets and quotes.  This can cut your Google AdWords bill 30% or more and improve the ranking of your ads.