Negative Keywords to Reduce PPC Costs by 10-40%

[adrenelyn]

Hello Everyone!

Just joined this forum to share some info I got from a Vancouver Search Marketing Meetup get together that I will be focusing more on for my clients...

A gentlemen named Ken Jurina did a quick presentation on how negative keywords on you ppc campaign can reduce your PPC marketing costs by 10-40% by decreasing irrelevant traffic impressions thereby increasing click-through rates and reducing bounce rates. This will in turn lead to higher quality scores and lower costs.

key points

- broad match is cheaper than exact match so use broad matches and make a huge list of negative keywords through mining your google analytics data for negative words, up to 10,000 per campaign
- also use google suggest and a few other programs to come up with the negative phrases (microsoft mutation, google search query)
- the goal is to reduce all impressions that produce BAD clicks
- Creating a NKW is time-consuming but is definitely worth the effort
- Using a huge NKW list will result in a drop in impressions and clicks, but if done properly will make your campaign more effective and have higher ROI

[Lucid]

Broad matches are not necessarily cheaper. If they are, it's not because they are broad but because that's the way advertisers are using them compared to phrase (which you don't mention) or exact match.

Think of it this way. If I have an exact match and it does well (CTR and conversions), I'd put more money into it to monopolize that keyword. That is, get top spot resulting in more clicks and likely higher conversions.

There is also the new modified broad type that you should use instead of the regular broad. Note that I think broad matches should be longer tailed keywords and used mostly for research, not a long-term approach. You should have a higher percentage of impressions on phrase and exact. This way, you also minimize a huge list of negatives. As you say, it is time-consuming but you won't need them as much using phrase matches.

[adrenelyn]

Good points. It is true that broad matches aren't always cheaper. But exact matches more often than not are more expensive because if they receive higher search volumes they are also more competitive. By using broad matches AND phrase matches (you are right i did not mention) with negative keywords you can hit the exact matches at a lower cost.

Phrase matches work well and you still would want to use a large negative keyword list to reduce your ppc costs.

If you use the phrase "black dress shoes" you don't want to be matching for
"cheap black dress shoes" or "ugly black dress shoes" in your campaign.

For a service company, if you use the the phrase "new york plumbing" or "plumbing services", you don't want to be matching for "bad new york plumbing" or "worst plumbing services"

Take advantage of the negative keywords feature and you can help with your phrase matching and broad matching. The amount of NKWs you can include are vast, so mine your google analytics data and use suggestion tools to create the list.