Looking for negative keyword list for financial product

Hi Marketing Monk,

Curating a negative keyword list for a specific campaign is an investment in time, money, and a fair amount of work. In addition, the actual list of negative keywords will vary to some degree based upon the goals of the campaign. It should be no surprise that some people are unwilling to share their negative match keyword lists considering the investment involved in obtaining the list, and even then it may not apply perfectly to your specific offer.

There is no such thing as a "general" negative keyword list, that we often see suggested by novice marketers. Each list needs to be tailored to the specific needs of the client's business, and to the specific goals of the campaign. Advanced targeting strategies will often involve thousands of negative keywords, in some cases nearly as many negative match keywords as non-negatives.

While it is quite easy to get started in PPC advertising, learning to master the craft can be very challenging. There is a relatively steep learning curve involved and lots of potential mistakes, many which may prove to be costly. Be prepared for this reality, or consider hiring an experienced PPC specialist to manage your campaigns.

You said However, that is not always good advice. For example, I have a client that sells a high ticket item that generates 63% of his conversions from keywords that include the term "cheap". If you applied your "general" list of negative match keywords you would have cut his conversions by more than half. And, what's worse is that you would have never known because you applied the negative match keyword without even a test of the actual performance of that audience segment.

The bottom line is that in PPC advertising, like most marketing channels, you are much better off making data driven decisions. Sure there will be obvious negative keywords that are simply not relevant. However you won't have a full list of those without researching, and testing the keywords your are currently targeting.

Here is my recommendation for curating your own list of negative match keywords.

First define the goals of your campaign. your targeting should be based on achieving those goals. The type of campaign you setup and the targeting decisions will be based on the goals of your campaign.

Use the AdWords Keyword Planner to research keywords that are suggested for your landing page. Review that list and move any irrelevant keywords to your negative list. Then begin segmenting your audience targeting by selecting themes for your ad groups. Note keywords that have medium or low competition as that is a signal of a keyword that will need to be segmented and tested as a potential negative match keyword.

You can dig deeper by taking your relevant keyword list and entering those keywords, a few at a time, into the AdWords Keyword Planner tool to curate more related keywords and again, review and move irrelevant terms to your negative match lists.

When using advanced keyword targeting strategies, you will typically develop negative match keyword lists for each individual ad group within your campaign. But that is something you can learn after you get the basics down

At this point you are nowhere near done curating your negative match keyword lists, but it should be adequate to start testing your campaign. After the campaign has been running at least 24 hours you should begin to see data showing in your Search Terms report. You will want to review this report on a frequent basis to identify more irrelevant terms that need to be added to your negative match keyword lists. I suggest you review this report at least a few times during the first week and then weekly from that time onward. Over a couple months time you will develop a more comprehensive list of negative match keywords that will serve your clients needs well.

If you are working with an extremely limited budget, you may consider using only exact match and phrase match keywords, avoiding the use of broad match keywords which will reduce the number of negative match terms needed for your campaigns.

HTH