Google Ads (Formerly Adwords) is an incredibly powerful platform that makes it very easy to get lost in all that you can do, and if done wrong can have you spending a lot of money on an audience that isn’t likely to convert or buy from your website.
Thankfully, there’s a great time and money saving tool within Google Ads that you may not have discovered – negative keywords.
You may be spending money on searches that are completely irrelevant to your business or ones that you can assume won’t get you any sales.
If your business is, for example, a business that sells carpets online, and you’ve put in, as a keyword, carpets UK. This is a relevant keyword to you and your business, and people searching this would be trying to get to a business selling carpets.
However, this could also match to someone searching for carpets cleaning UK which isn’t what your business is aimed at.
Someone may click on the ad as they open up a few of the results, and then you’ve paid for someone to click through to your site, that isn’t likely to be a potential lead, and will likely just add to the bounce rate of your site.
Negative keywords are an easy way to combat this, by adding cleaning as a negative keyword this then stops any broad or phrase matches in your keywords then including searches with cleaning in.
Thinking about ones that may be relevant to your business and adding them in as negative keywords is a great money and time-saver for your business – it means less irrelevant traffic through to your site that’s then costing you money.
It also means less irrelevant enquiries from searches that don’t have much to do with your business (taking up your time and effort on something that won’t lead to a conversion).
These can be set up in much the same way as normal keywords are, if you go to the keywords page on Google Ads, then click ‘Negative Keywords’ next to Search Keywords.
A good place to look to try and find potential negative keywords is in the search terms people have used to see an click on your adverts before, to find some keywords or phrases that people have found you with, that aren’t as relevant to you.
This can really save you a lot of time and money and is something that can be set up very easily, and potentially improve traffic from your ads campaigns without needing any further tweaks.
If you want to enquire about our advertising management, please feel free to get in touch.