Managing Google ads can often be a complicated and confusing process that involves regularly checking each keyword to ensure you get the best return on your investment. There are many ways to optimize and improve Google campaigns, but one of the simplest solutions is often overlooked by many PPC managers. That solution is defining negative keywords. Why pay for cost-effective clicks and “fake” traffic? When you use negative keywords in Google Ads correctly, you can save up to 50% on your budget. Keyword optimization has brought many of our Movers Development clients significant budget savings and a better conversion rate.
The first question that arises is how to get such keywords? How do you find out what these phrases are? How to ensure that we have not excluded something that brings us turnover (and profit)? Here are some guidelines that can help you with your choice.
Matching Options
If you want to turn your top moving leads into clients, you need to know what they’re seeking. Keyword match types determine how well a keyword must match a search query.
Broad match
Here, your ads can appear on searches that are related to a given keyword. When you use Broad Match, your ad is eligible to show if a search query includes any of the words you specify, in any order. For example, if you use the term “interstate movers”, your ad will appear when someone types in interstate movers, but also for interstate batteries, local movers, or anything that contains one of these two words.
Phrase Match
Involves matching the meaning of your keyword. This type is slightly more flexible than an exact match and is more targeted than the broad match option. Your ad will only appear here when the user enters your keyword phrase, in the exact order, you entered. Your ad can also show if a user adds words to your keyword phrase before or after your phrase.
Exact Match
The exact match of a keyword to a user search query. Of all the three matching options, exact matching gives you the most control over who sees your ad. Google recently made changes to this option so that ads can also match searches that contain synonyms, plurals, or other variations of the keyword.
Let’s define negative keywords
Ads also allow you to set negative keywords – those words and terms that are in no way relevant to your interests. To begin, let’s divide these into three groups:
- The keywords we came up with through the research
- Keywords we came up with internal statistics
- Keywords that can be reached with templates
The keywords we came up with through independent research
In principle, the primary step in everything related to search marketing. Without researching and choosing keywords based on an assessment, you are well on your way to giving up the part of your budget that you could have used for those keywords that bring you conversions (and quality traffic).
Enter some of the keywords you use in your campaign and study the listed tools’ variations. Add all those you think are redundant and have nothing to do with what you’re advertising in a document that you’ll apply to your campaign later.
- Example: You advertise a service that comes at a price – or is not free – so excluding keywords that contain the word “free” would undoubtedly be a good move.
Keywords we came up with internal statistics
Every slightly more serious site has statistics on visitors, and this step is essential for achieving a successful marketing campaign. To find negative keywords, you need to click on the “Keywords” tab in the Adwords campaign and then on the “Search Terms.” You also need to set the period for which you want the statistics to be displayed.
Many users set their keywords to broad match, and their ads appear in all sorts of combinations based on the words you add to the campaign. Many times these are wrong phrases that need to be removed.
Keywords that can be reached with templates
It is easy to get to the already existing lists compiled and published by diligent users with a short Google search. The indexes can be pretty extensive and divided into categories, so they should be easier to apply if you find an area of interest. Of course, take all the suggested words “with a grain of salt” – comb through the selection and single out the ones you think might help you.
Why you should use negative keywords in Google Ads
Of course, using negative words alone is not enough for complete optimization when it comes to Google Ads for moving companies. But, it is just one of the effective actions we can take towards better results. Negative keywords help us achieve a better CTR (click-through rate), to make the phrases and words we compete for more relevant to our ad and the landing page itself.
Accordingly, our CPC should decrease over time, resulting in more impressions for our ad within the same budget and more clicks. More clicks on our ad would mean that there would be more potential customers on our site.
In short, a few negative keywords in the ad group itself could contribute to more customers. It can be said that we add negative keywords to our ad groups/campaigns in 2 cases. The first case is when setting up the campaign itself. The second case is during monitoring the results of the campaign itself and adding in accordance with the required phrases.
To conclude
When we use negative keywords in Google Ads at the campaign or ad group level, it ensures that our ad is not shown on searches that contain that selected negative keyword. The Google Ads system loves relevant ads! Relevant ads are, in short, beneficial to both the user and the advertiser. Such ads can run at sometimes significantly lower cost-per-clicks. If users click on our ad to increase its CTR, then Google will consider that ad more relevant. Remember to always think about the intention of the user. Start identifying irrelevant keywords that often trigger your ads and eliminate them using negative keywords.
