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Evan Magers, iSearch Media
In these articles I write, I've noticed something of a narrative tic. I seem to make a lot of percentage estimates about the amount of AdWords advertisers I see making certain mistakes. Let me state for the record that these are not scientific calculations. Eyeball guesses, really. But I've worked with hundreds of AdWords accounts, between my time working at Google, my tenure as the head in-house guy for a major Internet company, and the countless clients I've handled the PPC advertising for as a consultant; and when you've seen as many simple but absolutely fatal mistakes occur again and again and again as I have, you start to take an interest in the topic.
So here's yet another statistic from Our Humble Narrator. I'd estimate that half of all AdWords advertisers couldn't tell you what a negative keyword is. If you can honestly count yourself above the 50th percentile here, good for you, but you're not out of the woods just yet. Apart from that fatally clueless 50 percent, I'd say that another 30-40% are running campaigns with fewer than 10 negative keywords protecting the gates. So stupid, people. So, so stupid. I don't mean to hurt your feelings, but no one's aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct.
The 10-20 percent of you who remain, well, a lot of you are among the small minority who succeed and see real profits from Google AdWords. If this applies to you, by all means, read on. Perhaps I'll say something to amuse you, maybe you'll learn a thing or two in the meantime. But really, you've been working too much. Go reap the benefits of your smart (which doesn't necessarily mean hard) work. Take your kid to the petting zoo and watch him feed a carrot to a baby rabbit. Have a few afternoon cocktails and turn a Tom Jones 8-track on full-blast. Ask your mailman if he'd like to share a fondue dinner sometime; you only live once, after all.
But enough. Down to business. Negative keywords. Some people have 'em, use 'em, benefit from 'em. Most people don't. Which means most people are letting their ads run wild, showing on most any old search term under the sun. Queries that are irrelevant, worlds away from relevant, are triggering their ads. An art supply store is advertising to a teenaged boy on a hunt for celebrity porn pics. A woman searches online for a rare stamp and is shown an ad for a hip-hop lyrics archive. An old man, embarrassed by a growing incontinence problem, uses his daughter's Interweb to try to buy diapers online anonymously will he click on the ad he sees for the newest Ciara ringtone download? He just might, because his vision is poor and he believes he reads in the ad something about the prescription drug Cialis. Google registers a click and the cash meter makes a tick. Will this click lead to a sale? Stop wasting my time with stupid questions.
Okay, the old man probably won't click on the ad. But in a way that's almost worse. You people need to understand something. Let's put it in socio-business terms: the more often your ads gets clicked on, the better Google likes you, because the more money you make for them. The less they're clicked on, the less Google likes you. Google gives treats to accounts it likes. It punishes those it dislikes.
It punishes you through your Quality Score (please, please, please read __this__ article if you don't know what that means). A good Quality Score is like your VIP pass to the world of easy Internet money, increased sales, a more popular website whatever you're trying to get your hands on through AdWords. Without the VIP pass, it's real, real tough to sneak in. The bouncers are big and imposing and every now and then like to rough a few schmucks up a little. Quality Score is the name of the game, the whole shebang, everything. In a way, it's the only thing. My point is, you have to chase it, massage it if you're able to catch it, protect it with your every defense. And the more often your ad is delivered to people who have no interest in your site, the more that beautiful Quality Score tries to scurry away. And if you have between zero and few negative keywords at the campaign level, I'm guessing that you're showing your ad anywhere between 20 and 99% of the time to people who couldn't care less about whatever you're trying to peddle, Jack.
Let's take a case fresh on my mind, because a potential new client sent me a screenshot of his account history this afternoon, and this is what I saw. A few details have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent, though this ain't an isolated case, so those details don't really matter. Here are the back-of-the-baseball-card stats:
Industry: Medical
Impressions: a whole lot
Clicks: not a whole lot
CTR: less than .02%
Campaigns: 1
Ad Groups: 1
Keywords:
New york
Nyc
Hypnotherapy
Fear
Anxiety
Stop smoking
Viagra
Depression
Campaign Negative Keywords: 0
This man is one of the top hypnotherapists in the world. He's helped actors who have won Oscars quit smoking; an Arabian prince flies to America weekly to see him for help with an acute fear of the color orange. He charges exorbitant rates and rakes it in. He's heard quite correctly that PPC advertising is a phenomenal way to draw even more business, but he's had an impossible time seeing results.
Can anyone tell me why?
Sure, most of those keywords have something to do with what he's trying to advertise (except for new york and nyc I guess he just has a low opinion of the mental state of New Yorkers in general), but he's so far away from being able to compete on them that I don't even know where to begin. I'm almost regretting bringing this up as an example, because there's a beautiful girl waiting for me to meet her for dinner and I've given myself a monstrous number of things to pontificate about. Well, she'll have to wait.
Problem #1: 1 campaign, 1 Ad Group
Some small advertisers can get away with keeping their whole account in one campaign, but pretty much nobody can keep it all in one Ad Group and see an ounce of success. Segment it out, people. One keyword theme, one Ad Group. Think about it logically. The system bases your Quality Score on the relevance of your ad text to the keywords that trigger it. So you write specific ad text for specific categories of keywords, and you keep those categories separate. Don't let hypnotherapy keywords play with depression keywords. Hypnotherapy keywords go with hypnotherapy ad texts. Depression keywords go with depression ad texts. Separated, they'll do great things for you. Put them together and they'll tear each other apart.
Problem #2: 8 keywords
I've handled huge accounts and I've handled tiny accounts. In my early days at Google I learned how to optimize by handling the campaigns of advertisers looking to spend five bucks a day. Less, even. Never and I mean never have I found an account that works best with fewer than 50 keywords. 8 keywords, even if they're each moneymakers for you, would make more money if you multiplied their number by ten. You need a lot of keywords, patient pupils of mine. A lot of them. One oft-quoted PPCman axiom is Cast your keyword net wide, my son, for that way you catch more fish.
Problem #3: Terrible keywords
Which in this case means too-broad, too-general keywords. Keywords that might relate to the business. But might not, probably not, almost certainly not in all but a tiny fraction of cases. Hypnotherapy had far and away the best performance out of this sorry lot, but the numbers even on that one stunk, and why? I come to Problem #4, the inspiration for this article...
Problem #4: Zero negative keywords
Especially with a keyword list this general, negative keywords are the only way to save your account from totally tanking.
But let's take a step back. What exactly is a negative keyword?
A negative keyword is a word that prevents your ad from being triggered when that word is included in a search term.
Negative keywords are critically important in even the best, most targeted keyword list imaginable. But let's stick to my hypnotherapist example. Again, here are his keywords:
New york
Nyc
Hypnotherapy
Fear
Anxiety
Stop smoking
Viagra
Depression
I won't take the time to go through each of these keywords and list out all the negatives he would need even to stand a chance of success, so let's focus on one. One of his keywords is 'fear,' and he has it in broad match. This means that his ad could hypothetically be triggered by ANY Google query which includes the word 'fear.' Such as
'cape fear'
'fear of flying'
'fear factor'
'fear quotes'
'fear pc game'
'fear cheats'
These are just the first few I came up with, very quickly. As you can imagine, there are probably hundreds of others that are just as unrelated to the services my hypnotherapist offers; and yet, since this advertiser has no negative keywords, his ad is being shown to Google users searching for video games, movies, television shows, and on and on and on.
So how do you prevent these unrelated queries from triggering your ad? Answer: negative keywords.
If you want to run on a keyword as general as 'fear,' you need to spend a good long while coming up with all the popular search terms that include 'fear,' and you need to negative them out. By this I mean, based just on the short list I came up with above, your negative keyword list needs to include the following:
cape
capes
factor
factors
show
shows
quote
quotes
pc
p.c.
game
games
videogame
videogames
cheat
cheats
code
codes
Again, this is off the top of my head. You'll notice a couple of things: one, that I included my negative keywords in varied forms. So I don't just put it 'factor,' but also include 'factors.' This is just me being meticulous and careful. As I see it, you might as well get all variations of those words you don't want your ad showing on, just to be safe. The other thing you'll notice is that I not only included 'cheat' and 'cheats,' but also 'code' and 'codes.' I'm extrapolating a little bit here. I know, based on running a simple Google search for the query 'fear,' that there is a popular video game with that name. So I want to think about that video game; I want to think about all types of queries people might search on when looking for stuff related to the video game called Fear. And I want to negative these people out, because they're not looking for hypnotherapy services. To go further with this example, we might throw in the negative keywords 'rent,' 'rental,' 'rentals,' 'forum,' 'forums,' 'strategy,' 'strategies,' and so forth anything we can think of that might have to do with the video game Fear. One of the best ways to generate a list of important negatives is simply by searching on Google with your keyword and seeing what kinds of unrelated websites appear. This is a good place to start.
There are a couple of ways to add a negative keyword. More often than not I add them at the campaign level; when you do this, your negative keywords affect all Ad Groups within your campaign. Now, it's possible that within your campaign you could have one Ad Group advertising hypnotherapy services, and another Ad Group advertising this video game we're talking about. If this is the case, your account isn't organized very well, probably products or services as unrelated as these two should be placed in their own campaigns but let's stick to this example anyway. This is one case where you'd want to add certain negative keywords at the Ad Group level instead of the campaign one. For instance, in your hypnotherapy Ad Group you'd have the negative keyword 'game,' but you wouldn't want that negative affecting your video game Ad Group.
To add a negative keyword at the Ad Group level, go into the Ad Group, then the Keywords tab; on the left side of the interface you'll see + Add keywords: Quick add. Click here. Type a dash, then the keyword you want to negative out. Like this:
-game
-games
-videogame
-videogames
-cheat
-cheats
-code
-codes
The dash, or negative sign, means that the word or phrase that follows it is a negative keyword, and your ad will never show when it's part of the query a Google user searches under.
The other way to add a negative keyword and again, I use this probably 95% of the time when I'm adding negatives is at the campaign level, which, logically, affects the entire campaign. This is even easier to do. Click on the campaign. Under the name to the upper left you'll see your Campaign Daily Budget. Under Campaign Daily Budget you see '0 campaign negative keyword(s): edit'. Click on 'edit'. Type your negatives. You don't need to put the dash in front of them the system already knows to make these keywords negatives.
I can't state it strongly enough. Adding negative keywords might be the single change you need to make to turn your AdWords losses into profits. If you don't have any negatives in your campaigns, and you're running on AdWords right now, I highly recommend that you log into your account right this minute and start adding negative keywords. No point wasting any more money.
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