My Beginner Guide to identify Negative Keywords (Updating)

Negative keywords are essential to prevent PPC ads from matching to irrelevant search queries. Many of the search terms of your products/services could be more ambiguous as you could imagine. I didn't pay much attention to negative keywords because I think our business is in a slight niche and firmly new market. But my thorough research has proved me to be completely wrong.

As I have been struggling to find the right negative keywords when started, I thought I would share the practice and keep it updated as a way for me to keep learning.

Manual Searching

It all starts with brainstorming. Type any keywords you want to bid in Google search bar and see what comes up. Look at what else is being advertised and is showing in organic results? Do you find any words that are not related to your business?

Let me explain by giving our business as an example: I searched "virtual reality" on Google, and I was given organic results like "best virtual reality headset" & "virtual reality games". These keywords are not relevant to our business as we are a virtual event service.

Google Auto-fill Suggest

Enter your keywords on Google search bar and make the most use of auto-fill suggest by filtering out unrelated keywords. Every letter you add to your search query will refresh auto-fill suggestions which potentially generates a ton of new ideas of negative ideas.

Google Keyword Planner

If you don't have the subscription of any keyword tools, Google Keyword Planner is a completely free tool that gives you even more ideas of negative keywords.

Given the same example of "virtual reality", Google Keyword Planner gives a ton of keyword ideas, and it broadens the search into more keywords such as "mixed reality", "augmented reality". Now I've found more negative keywords to add to my campaigns.

One note is that Google Keyword Planner also helps with your bidding budget. Top of page bid(low range) & Top of page bid(high range) shows the bid from other advertizers and gives an excellent idea of what the least and the most bid you need to go for.

Search Terms Report

Last but not least, a powerful free tool - Google Adwords search terms report. It allows you to see what terms people are searching and these terms result in the ads being shown.

Generally speaking, my practice is to start the campaign by biding Board Match keywords. Wait for at least one week for some data to come into the account. Then examine the search terms report to add irrelevant keywords as negative Exact Match keywords.

I've found a bunch of irrelevant search terms such as "dating online", "meet girls online"... These terms match the Broad Match keywords "meet friends online". I would not realize the completely wrong match until I looked at the search terms report.

You can also find search terms of a particular keyword by filtering if there are sufficient searches to generate a report.

The Next Step

You should always be exploring new negative keywords. The next step - probably continues running the campaign with Broad Match keywords for weeks. It depends on how much budget you have for testing and exploring negative keywords. Then I would change Broad Match type into Broad Modifier Match (BMM) type, together with Exact Match negative keywords. Repeat the whole searching process from the beginning and add more negative keywords as the campaign goes.

Also, pay more attention to find Not-Ready-To-Buy keywords, such as -free -cheap -reviews -comparison -rating -option -info -how-to. You can easily find a recommended list of them just by googling.