Ok, so you may have seen that using negative keywords in your Google Adwords campaignsis a good idea and in fact suggested by Google. So what are negative keywords and why would you want to use them? Well let’s start with a brief description of what a negative keyword is:

A Negative keyword is denoted in the Google Adword system by using a “-” before the word. This will prevent your ad from being triggered when the word after the “-” appears.

Example Word List:

Santa Monica Homes
Santa Monica CA Homes

-Rent

In the sample word list above if anything in the search that the user typed had the word “Rent” than your ad wouldn’t trigger. Unless you want your ad to show up to people who are looking for rentals you want to exclude your ad from those searches. You only want your ad appearing to a targeted group of people and if you don’t want to target renters then you would want to ad negative keywords to your campaign for words that are related to renting.

Now that we got the definition out of the way let’s get into some reasons why you would want to use Negative Keywords in your Google ads.

1. Your Ad is not showing to uninterested parties - You only want your ad to be in front of the people who want to buy or sell right? People who are interested in home repairs or renting a home are probably not a client you want to be paying for because they wanted to look at what is available. You want to attract the most focused group of people possible.
2. It improves your quality score- Why is this important? We will get into that in point four but the most important thing is that Google rewards those who have higher quality of ads. They want advertisers only focused on targeted groups of consumers because they only want to present the MOST relevant ads or content to their web surfers.
3. It improves your CTR (click through rate) - Your click through rate is measured by the percentage of times your ad is clicked divided by the number of times your ad is shown. So if your ad is shown 100 times and clicked 3 times you have a 3% CTR. You want a CTR above 1% as it shows Google you know how to write a quality ad.
4. It lowers your cost- that’s right! Google rewards you financially. Those advertisers that have a higher CTR and a higher quality score pay less per click than those who write poor ads. Google’s system is designed to reward those who write better ads and they do this by charging you less per click than your competitors.

Remember that advertising with Google Adwords is a process and you can always work in pieces to improve your ads. While CTR and quality score are important you want to make sure that your ads are delivering the right customers and these are just two measurements that allow you to do that.