I don’t talk about ad copy a lot, so let’s fix that today.
A big rule I follow in writing is that your content should be used as a dissuasive tool just as much as a persuasive one. Yes, you want to attract the right kind of customers to work with you. But you also want to keep people who aren’t the right fit from contacting you too. It’s a waste of everyone’s valuable time, after all. This is all the more important if you’re writing ad copy – where you have a limited number of words or characters to get your message across.
But how on earth do you do that?
Well, there are a lot of different ways. Tone and language topic are popular, but one of the lesser-known, methods specifically for online ad copy is using negative keywords.
What Are Negative Keywords?
In a nutshell, negative keywords are words or phrases that stop Google (and any other search platforms you’re advertising on) from showing your ad in search results. They won’t stop your ad from being shown altogether – don’t worry! But they will signal that you don’t want your ad to be displayed for that keyword, and so it saves you a lot of money that could otherwise be wasted.
Don’t forget, ad platforms don’t always get their targeting right, and certainly not all the time. Which means that sometimes your ad could appear in results that are irrelevant or inappropriate for you. For example, your ad could turn up in searches for:
- Products you don’t sell
- Discount codes or vouchers
- Product reviews
- Information or how-to style content
- Adult content
Obviously, if your ad turns up there and someone clicks on it, then you lose money. Every time someone who isn’t in your target audience or doesn’t intend to buy clicks on your links, it costs you money. So, you want to dissuade the wrong people from clicking on your link with negative keywords.
For example. Say you’re a fashion retailer, but you only carry adult clothes. You don’t want anyone looking for children’s clothes clicking on your link. So your negative keywords would be ‘kid’s clothes’ or ‘children’s clothing’. This would stop your ad from turning up in searches related to kid’s clothing, saving you money.
Types of Negative Keywords
In general (and by that I mean in Google) there are three types of negative keywords:
- Negative broad match
- Negative phrase match
- Negative exact match
These all pretty much do what they say on the tin. Negative broad match keywords would be something that encompasses not just the keyword you type, but things that are broadly related. For example, if you use ‘kid’s clothes’ as the negative broad match keyword, then it will also exclude terms like ‘children’s clothes’ ‘clothes for children’ and ‘best children’s clothing in [location]’. It’s worth knowing that negative broad match is the default for Google Ads.
A negative phrase match keyword won’t show your ad to anyone searching for any of the negative terms, even if they’re in the wrong order. So, your search wouldn’t display if someone searched ‘clothes for kids’, since it has those negative terms in it.
Finally, negative exact match keywords will only exclude searches that contain that exact keyword match in the right order. Following the example above, this means your search would still appear in ‘children’s clothes’ – just not ‘kid’s clothes’. This approach means you need to think carefully about your negative keywords and which to use.
How Do Negative Keywords Work?
Negative keywords basically work in the opposite way to normal keywords. Instead of telling the search engine what keywords and phrases you want to be found for, you’re telling them what you don’t want to be found for. By giving the platform a negative keyword list, it can understand all the terms you don’t want your ads to show for.
You can use negative keywords on any platform that runs ads in a Pay Per Click fashion – Google, Amazon Facebook, eBay and any others. It just tells the network to not show your ad to anyone including these words in their query. Doing this will not only improve your ad relevance and get rid of those pesky irrelevant clicks, but it will increase the return you see on your ads and boost your quality score.
There you have it, a crash course on negative keywords! Like I always say, I’m not an expert on SEO, but I am an expert on copywriting, which means I have to also be an expert on things like keywords. Whenever I write ad copy, I always ask for a list of both positive and negative keywords so that I can create content that will entice the right viewers, while sending signals to the wrong ones to stay away. If you’d like to know more about keywords (negative or otherwise), just give me a call and I’ll be happy to help.