You unleashed a major PPC campaign for your website or landing page and your site has received a ton of traffic from the campaign. The problem is that even though users are clicking on your pay per click ad, you’re not getting the conversions that you hoped for. There could be a few different reasons for the lack of conversions but one of the most common reasons why this may be occurring is negative keywords. If this isn’t your first go-around with pay per click ads, you may already know what negative keywords are and how they can affect your conversion rate, but it’s always a good idea to revisit negative keywords from time to time. For those with little to no PPC experience, let’s quickly go over what negative keywords are and how they can affect your conversion rate.
Negative keywords get clicks but they don’t get conversions because they’re either a. not related to what you’re marketing or b. the keyword is too broad. Your ad appears when users search for the keyword or key phrase, but the user’s who are seeing the ad are not your targeted audience. As an example, say you’re selling an e-book about learning how to market online. While the key phrases “learn how to market online” or “Internet marketing e-book” would be suited for your targeted audience, broad based keywords such as “e-book” and “Internet marketing” would be considered negative keywords.
The above two broad based keywords would be considered negative keywords because they’re attracting a mass audience; not the specific audience that you’d like to reach. The word “e-book” can be used in so many different situations that it’s nearly impossible to list them all. If a person is searching for “e-book” in general, there’s a good chance that the specific type of e-book that they’re looking for or the specific information about e-books that they’re looking for isn’t what you’re offering. Therefore, the user clicks your ad, which then charges your PPC account but once they land on your website, they realize that it’s not relevant and they leave. If this happens enough, you have a huge PPC expense and very few conversions. Not exactly the outcome that you had in mind when you ventured into PPC marketing.
When using pay per click marketing, you want to be able to reach your preferred audience and you’re not going to be able to do so with PPC negative keywords. While you’ll reach people, they won’t be the right people and in the end, your conversions will stay down. Due to this, you need to be able to manage your negative keywords and there are a few ways to do this.
The first thing to take note of when you’re learning how to manage PPC negative keywords is that you’re not going to know all of the negative words right away. You’ll be able to think of quite a large list, but it’d be impossible to know every single word that’s going to hurt your PPC campaign right at the start. It’s important to track your campaigns so that as time goes on, you can add keywords to your negative list.
Speaking of your list…it’s something you must have. A PPC negative keywords list is simply a long list of words that you don’t want your ad to appear for. If you’re running multiple PPC campaigns, then you should also have a list of negative keywords for each campaign. Having this list and adding to it as time goes on is one of the easiest ways of managing negative keywords.
If you’re using Google for your PPC campaigns, you can list your negative keywords in your ad group. Just make sure to keep adding negative keywords as you find them so that you’re giving yourself the best chance of getting the conversion rate that you want. Adding in negative keywords is one of the essential steps that’s often forgotten about when people are first setting up their PPC accounts. If you forget to do it initially, you can always go back in later and add them in, but it’s always best to start with them in there to keep your ads relevant.
