When expanding your campaigns you may find using phrase and broad match useful and profitable. However, along with these match types comes unwanted searches which can wreak havoc on your campaign.
The most notable ways it can affect your bottom line is: inflated impressions this can lower your CTR, which lowers your quality score and can raise your CPC. Not good. Another way is directly getting a lot of clicks, which will drain your budget. Enter negative keywords. Crafting a well developed negative keyword list can bring your campaign back in sync and give you a better ROI.
Below are 7 tips to help you in your negative keyword research:
1. Use the Search Engines
Take some time to search in google/yahoo/msn your core keywords and skim the results. Sometimes you will find sights that have different themes than what you are after. If it doesn’t match your product or service you might consider adding it as a negative keyword. For example search abs in google. Most people immediately think of 6 pack abs. But skim the results and you will find the organization of American Bureau of Shipping, site on anti-lock braking system, as well as ABS being a type of plastic … who knew?
2. Check out Google Suggest/Keyword Tool
Google suggest and their keyword tool are excellent ways to uncover phrases you’d never think of. You may also want to do a quick search in google news to make sure nothing current relates to your offer.
3. Thesaurus
Use this to get your brain juices flowing. It can also be a good tool to expand your keyword list and add parallel themes to your campaign.
4. Run a Search Query Report
Few people utilize the reports section in Google. Don’t be one of them. A search query lets you know the exact keywords being searched for in your campaigns. It does have an annoying category of other unique queries. Most tracking software can flesh these out …
5. Other Keyword Tools
There are a handful of keyword tools out there, some paid others not.
6. Ebay!
Ebay sells anything and everything. If you’re doing retail type products, this is a good way to see if other product descriptions are similar to yours. Take for example “Maximizer” which is the product of a popular CRM (Customer Relationship Management – these things are very pricey) software. however a quick search in Ebay will also show curling irons, vitamins, indoor tanning lotion, audio plug-ins, pool cues etc…
7. Don’t forget your brain
This is your #1 tool hands down. We all want some fancy software where we type in a few keywords and *bam* it spits out everything we want. If you just take the time for a few hours to sit and think and brainstorm, both your keyword list and negative keywords will be much more accurate and worthwhile. Don’t be lazy!
Got another way of getting negative keywords? Share it with us ..
