Have you been looking at your search terms report only to find that your ads are continuing to appear for queries that you previously added as negative keywords? Not to worry, we explain why this happens and how to fix it in this blog post. Just a warning, you may find yourself eye-rolling as you read through this blog post.
Table Of Contents
- What Exactly are Negative Keywords?
- How do I decide what should be a negative keyword?
- Why aren’t my negative keywords working? They’re still appearing in my search terms report.
- So how do I properly set my negative keywords to fix this?
What Exactly are Negative Keywords?
To truly understand negative keywords you first need to think about search queries. Search queries refer to what a person types into the search bar on Google, Bing, or other search engine.
So let’s say that you own a pizza by the slice business. To help drum up some new customers you decide to run ads on Google. When creating the ad you get to pick the types of search queries you’d want your ads to show up for. For this example you’ll probably want to show up for people searching for things like “pizza shop” or “pizza near me”.
Negative keywords are a great resource to help your budget go further. Continuing with our vegan pizza shop example, let’s say someone searches for “vegan pizza near me” on Google. If your pizza shop doesn’t have any vegan offerings then you can add vegan as a negative keyword. Now your ad will stop appearing when someone includes the word vegan in their search query. Pretty great, right?
How do I decide what should be a negative keyword?
Start with your Search Terms report. This is a report that tells you what people are typing into Google to get your ad to appear. In GoogleAds you can find this in the navigation menu under the Keywords section.
If you spot anything that seems truly unrelated to your business or offerings then that’s a good candidate for a negative keyword.
Why aren’t my negative keywords working? They’re still appearing in my search terms report.
This is the very question that inspired this blog post. Adding a negative keyword requires you to be more specific than you would think.
Continuing with our pizza shop example, you create an ad for people searching for “pizza near me” and added the negative keyword “vegan” as a broad match. Great. After a few days you return to your search terms report and are surprised to find out your ad has continued to show for search queries that contain vegan. How annoying is that?
As it turns out, broad match negative keywords aren’t actually very broad. So when you added “vegan” as a negative broad match that means your ad won’t show up for queries like “vegan pizza near me” but your ad could continue to show for variations of vegan like “veganized pizza near me” and “vegans pizza” and “vegun pizza near me”.
Are you eye-rolling yet? Why would Google do this? We’re pretty sure money is the answer. Google has an incentive to show your ads as often as possible. The more people that click on your ad means the more money you pay them. You pay per click.
So how do I properly set my negative keywords to fix this?
Add EVERY SINGLE variation of the negative keyword. This means you’ll have to keep a close eye on your search terms report to find any variations or related search queries that you don’t want your ad to appear for. This also include misspellings such as “vegun”.
Are you as annoyed as we were to find this out? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Written by Mikhail Cherniss
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