Imagine you’re managing a campaign for a product that sends videos over optical fiber. Would you think to set “Justin Bieber” as a negative keyword? I know I wouldn’t. As it turns out, this is one of the best moves my client, Rolands, has made.
Rolands oversees paid search for AD Net, a Taiwanese manufacturer of Formosa cables. A few weeks ago, as he was mining his search query data, he noticed that his ads were showing to searchers looking for videos of Justin Bieber—not exactly his target audience!
He quickly realized that Google considered “Bieber” to be a misspelling of “fiber,” which is one of the most prominent keywords in his account. There were so many variations of Bieber queries that Rolands found himself “cleaning Biebers for the next few weeks.”
If you’re lucky, your keywords aren’t matching to one of the most commonly searched pop singers on Google. That said, we should all be utilizing negatives to help ensure our ads are only being shown to qualified searchers. Google can get pretty aggressive with its broad matching, and you don’t want to end up paying for a Belieber’s clicks.
Here are my 5 top tips for adding negative keywords:
Erin Sagin worked at WordStream for five years with roles in Customer Success and Marketing. She lives in California.
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