Understanding 'Negative' Keywords

You can’t simply start using advertising online without setting some boundaries concerning words you do NOT want your ads to appear for.

Keyword targeting

When you look into advertising your website online, you will probably be dealing with one of the major search engine companies and their specialized ad targeted programs. You’ll be paying for every time your ad is shown or clicked on, depending on your plan. The most common forms involve purchasing specific keywords that you wish your ad to appear in response to.

If you wish to market a particular product, such as a natural cure for sinusitis, you will want to target words like sinusitis cure, sinus remedy, etc. However, perhaps you don’t want people feeding the cure to their children for legal reasons, so exclude words such as ‘kids cold’  ‘kid sinus infection’, baby cold, etc. Once you start to receive response to your ads you can refine your keyword list to maximize your traffic.

Think about how consumers search when choosing your keywords. Ask yourself what you would type in if you were searching for a product like the one you sell. begin by writing down a list of all the different categories your product could fit into, and then add sales words like best, natural, organic, favorite, cheap and affordable.

Geo-targeting is also a good idea if you have a physical store location and want to advertise it as well. Simply add  keywords such as NY, Seattle, South Side or the Bay area to your list.

One of the most common ways to pay for advertising is based on CPM, or ‘cost-per-thousand impressions’. (M is the Roman numeral for a thousand) An impression is the showing of your ad in response to a searcher using one or more of the keywords you specified. A rate of $30 CPM would mean you are charged $30 for every thousand times your ad is shown. Getting the most sales out of your impressions is what keyword targeting is all about. (Some also use pay per click, which we will deal with in the next blog post as the approach is slightly different- you don’t pay every time it’s shown, but every time it is clicked on.)

How Negative Keywords can be a Positive for Your Business

Negative (or excluded) keywords are a way for website owners to prevent their site from showing up on keyword searches. Remember, many websites still pay CPM instead of pay per click, meaning they are charged for advertising based on how many times their ad appears in response to searches by consumers.

If you run a website that sells exclusively women’s shoes, you probably want your ad to pop up in responses to searches that include combinations of the keywords shoes, boots, women, female, and a multitude of variations.

But what if some-one runs a search for ‘men’s shoes’? If your ad pops every time shoes is input, this search will produce your ad as well. You will pay for these views, and have a slim to none chance of making a sale.

Good news, though – you can exclude certain keywords, which will help you narrow your audience to those who are interested in your product. By making men, men’s, male, masculine and other variations of the word ‘negative’ for appearances of your ads on search, you can reduce the number of wasted views considerably. (While Google uses the term ‘negative’ for these keywords, Yahoo refers to them as ‘excluded’. These mean the same thing).

Now you will still get views from consumers searching for shoes, women’s shoes, and woman’s boots, but any search with the word men or a variation thereof will not show your ad. This should increase your conversion rate and ROI substantially.

As always,  trial and error will be the norm until you figure out the proper balance of keywords to include or exclude so you get the most out of your advertising budget.