When you, as an advertiser, can discover not only which queries people actually make but also what keywords and ads they trigger, you can take back control over your account and learn how easily people convert under the proper settings.

Negative keywords have other purposes than to simply weed out irrelevant inquiries. Here are 3 simple ways you can increase conversions by using negative keywords.

First, let’s take another look at where to find the correct negative keywords for your ad campaign. Remember- How we find negative keywords will indicate how best to use them. Google does a great job of hiding search query reports by running them in-line with keyword reporting in the Adwords UI. The reports are no longer under the Reports tab.

Finding Negative Keywords

The way to find negative keywords is to drill down the list of keywords into the campaign or adgroup you want to see queries for. If for example you sell musical instruments, and you want to see the queries for “Gibson guitars” you would navigate to the Gibson Guitars adgroup or campaign and view the Keywords tab.

Once you have this list of keywords in this adgroup or campaign, you have the choice to view queries for either a selected keyword(s) or all keywords. If you are curious to see which queries originated from a specific keyword simply select the box next to that keyword. You can select as many as you want. To see all the queries for that adgroup or campaign simply don’t select any keyword boxes.

Above the keywords, there is a drop-down box that labeled See Search Terms. Depending on whether you selected particular keywords, you will either click on All or Selected. If you didn’t select any keywords to begin with, you won’t have the Selected option available; you’ll have to click All.

Now you have your list of search queries. From here either view the information on page or download it to CSV file.

Using Negative Keywords: Limit Irrelevant Inquiry

If I were to ask a random group of any ten advertisers what they would use negative keywords for all of them would say, “in order to limit irrelevant queries” or something to that effect. So as advertisers have always used negatives, you would just pick the terms in the query that make it irrelevant or unqualified and add those specific terms to the negative keyword list.

If you are still viewing a list of queries in Adwords, you’ll have to go Back to Keywords and click Add Negatives at the bottom of the actual keyword list. Feel free to add as many as you need to the adgroup or campaign of choice.

Direct Traffic to The Intended Destination
Now this is a powerful thing to do when you learn that you are sending qualified traffic to wrong adgroups. Going back to our previous Gibson example; you see that there are “Gibson guitar pickups” queries showing up in the Gibson Guitars adgroup. People looking for this specific Gibson part are actually clicking on an ad that takes them to a landing page with just guitars- they came for a guitar part and saw only guitars. The most common reaction is to abandon ship without bothering to search for the part elsewhere on the site.

In this instance, you should add “pickups” to the Gibson Guitar specific adgroup negative keywords list. Now people searching for pickups on this site cannot see the ads that point them to the Guitars page.

Limit Overly General Inquiry

Continuing with the example, you see a query “music instruments” appear with several clicks in the negative keyword list. Bidding on the term “music instruments” is too costly despite the fact that you sell musical instruments. Perhaps a search for music instruments is too general and people that don’t have a specific instrument in mind might be less serious about a purchase.

In this case, not having qualified your visitors from those simply searching for “music instruments” leads to higher conversions costs. It is basically the same thing as bidding on the keyword itself.

There’s an easy fix. Simply add the exact match version of the term to the campaign. Adding [music instruments] exact match to your negative keywords will stop these visitors from costing you more and will directly result in lower conversion cost.

Sometimes, general queries require that negative keywords are actually used in conjunction with directing traffic to their targets. A good example is when a very general but relevant query surfaces in a product/service specific adgroup. The example would be if in your Gibson Guitar Pickups adgroup, you saw the term “Gibson guitar parts.” This is a relevant query, however, too general for this adgroup.

Once again, you should add exact match [Gibson guitar parts] to the negative keyword list of the Pickups adgroup. Merely adding “parts” as a negative keyword could result in your ads not properly displaying for the query “Gibson pickups and parts.” It is better to use the exact match negative keywords to eliminate the specific query.

Qualifying and directing visitors with negative keywords will result in lower conversions cost for 3 reasons:

1. You eliminate the cost of irrelevant or overly general queries. Now your click costs are used toward likely converting keywords.
2. For irrelevant queries, your ads no longer show which increases your CTR and could affect Quality Score, lowering your cost per click and subsequently your cost per conversion.
3. You direct more visitors to the most relevant landing page and increase your conversion rate by limiting abandonment and distraction. Given a fixed amount of clicks, your conversion cost is decreased.

When attempting to lower high conversion cost, it is important that you take all the preceding steps to lower conversion cost before applying match settings. Match setting will likely result in lower traffic and consequently lower sales volume. If you race ahead and apply match settings prematurely, you might forgo the opportunity to lower conversion cost without lowering traffic and sales.

This is disastrous because once you apply the match settings, you won’t be able to receive as much feedback from search query reports that could help you better qualify visitors to start. Also, you will effectively be taking other underlying problems having to do with inefficiencies in the website and just shoving them under the carpet. In other words, if we apply match settings simply to lower conversion cost quickly, you might lower your conversion cost and not be motivated to fix the other lingering inefficiencies in the campaign or on your site.

So when is it a good time to apply match settings? I recommend applying match settings in 2 scenarios:

1) The Conversion Cost is way above your target CPA (cost per acquisition/conversion) AND there are alot of single occurrences of irrelevant variation appearing in the search query reports that is too difficult to control with negative keywords.

2) The budget is extremely limiting compared to available impressions and you want to make sure the clicks you do pay for go toward the exact or phrase match variation of the keyword.

Testing ad variations simultaneously should always be done in the first scenario since the objective is to lower conversion cost. You’ll want to make sure you know which match setting variations are going help you achieve your desired CPA before you rule out any of them.

To run you through a short example, let’s assume the Target CPA is $50 per conversion. Historically, you have been running this particular keyword at $120 per conversion which is totally unprofitable for this product. (You know it is unprofitable because the keyword describes a product that you could never make a profit on by paying $120 to advertise it.) You have tried optimizing your website for a higher conversion rate and also applied necessary keywords but the conversion cost is still too high for the keyword.

It’s time to test out some match settings. You might do this for several keywords with higher conversion costs so be prepared to test multiples.

Keyword Before Match Setting Variations

Keyword = $120 per conversion

Keyword After Match Setting Variations

Keyword (Broad Match) = $170 per conversion (Conversion cost is likely to go up because phrase and exact match settings will trigger most of the very relevant queries and their volume.)

“Keyword” (Phrase Match) = $60 per conversion

[Keyword]  (Exact Match) = $ 48 per conversion

I would advise everyone to let the data population add up before making any official assessment about the new conversion cost stats. The above example portrays the possible outcomes of three different match settings. After enough clicks have accrued and we see numbers like the ones above, I would either pause the broad match version or isolate it into another campaign with a smaller budget. I am always hesitant to simply pause out words because a huge lack in visitors could shock the system resulting in extremely low sales. If you isolate these words, you can lower its spend and try and work on its conversion cost later through other methods.

I would keep the phrase and exact match even though the phrase is still above the target conversion cost. It’s much closer now and you can continue to work on it. You might find you can get it down to the actual target with some more negatives and ad text qualifiers.

With broad match setting out of this campaign, you have effectively freed up some of this keyword’s wasted budget allocation which can now be spent on profitable keyword click costs. The result is more profitable sales and overall net returns.

DISCLAIMER: In my experience, advertisers claim to be focused on conversion cost but tend to be even more sensitive to total sales volume. The above techniques are designed to lower conversion cost but could and probably will result in lower but more profitable sales volumes.

One of the largest misconceptions that advertisers have is that they think people who click on their ad, always type in their “exact” keywords. This is really true only 5-10% of the time. Most of the time, they are searching some different, longer or shorter tail of the exact words. The point is that Google is trying to find relevant matches between what you offer and what people are searching for. The rub is that Google is a computer that doesn’t have the human-like capabilities to understand every single person’s searching intention and match it exactly with what you do. When looking for relevancy between your keywords and keyword searches, there lies irrelevant search queries.

So you grab this record of search queries called a Search Query Report. Once you have this report, you can go through it and look out for potential negative keywords that can be used to qualify for only the relevant search queries. How long would you spend sifting through wasteful keywords if you could save more than 10% of your monthly as spend? An hour? 2 hours? I’m gonna teach you how to do in less than 30 minutes a month.

I’ll tell ya- just about every time we have furnished an advertiser with this sort of analysis, the standard response has been, “I’m paying for that?” And the answer is -Yes.

We’ve written about this before and done a video but never really showed advertisers how easy this really is. Here it is.

Steps to Pulling Search Query and Adding in Negative Keywords to Qualify Buyers

1.  Go to Reporting tab in you Adwords account and click on Reports. Click on “Create New Report.”

2. On this page, make the following choices: 1) Report Type: Search Query, 2) Settings: Summary, enter last 90 days in date range, select relevant adgroups or campaigns, 3) Advanced Settings: Under Add or Remove Columns, make sure conversion metrics are checked off if you run conversion tracking, 4) Templates, Scheduling, and Email: Make any adjustments you want for future reporting and notifications.

3.  Click ‘Create Report’.

4. After the Report has completed, Click on Search Query Report to open it. At the top of the page is a button: Export Report. Click on it and download to CSV (for Excel). Once downloaded, open the CSV (Excel) file.

5.  Now reorganize the Excel by cutting and pasting the following columns next to the Search Query Column (Column C): Clicks, Cost, Conversions, Conversion Cost. (Conversion Columns needed only if running conversion tracking.)

6. Click on the Data tab at the top of the spreadsheet. Highlight the row that contains all of the column headings (usually Column 4). Click on the Filter setting in the spreadsheet header. Sort the Clicks Column from Largest to Smallest by selecting the Clicks heading in the spreadsheet.

7. Insert a column next to the Search Query column.

8. Begin sifting through the search queries, paying notice the Clicks, Cost and Conversion data. Look for queries that are particularly irrelevant or overly vague. Then in the vacant column, write in the terms that make that query irrelevant. For example, if you sell rock vinyl records but your search query is “birth records”, write or copy “birth” into vacant space next to the keyword. Do this for all irrelevant search queries that have at least 2 clicks. If in question about a keywords relevance, look to conversion data to how well the keyword has performed.

9.  Finally copy the whole new column of negative keywords and add then to the negative keyword section at the bottom of any keyword section in your adgroup campaign. To save work, and if the negatives should be negative across the entire campaign, you can add these to the campaign levels to save time.

Hope this helps you save time and money! Happy Pay-PerClicking!