Nobody wants to pay high PPC costs if they don't have to, right? There are certain circumstances out there where cost doesn't really matter, but for the most part we keep a close eye on our PPC budgets...especially when dealing with small business SEM. Diana Adams from Search Engine Guide has written several posts regarding strategies used to keep your PPC costs down. I hope the key takeaway for all of the readers was...drum roll...NEGATIVE KEYWORDS.
Having a very large set of negative keywords helps you keep unnecessary clicks to a minimum when using broad or phrase match types. Let's pretend that you have an online biscuit store. You want to keep your traffic high so you don't want to use exact match for everything. Keywords that may be included in a query that pertain to biscuits, but not your kind of biscuit, add as a negative...for instance 'dog'. You know that someone searching for a 'dog biscuit' will not likely buy your biscuit, so don't waste a click on them. An effective way to find new negative keywords is to run a search query report and see how searchers are finding your ads.
Not only do negative keyword lists help keep PPC costs down but they are actually quite fun to build. I have seen some pretty humorous negative keyword lists...much of which are derived from search query reports. It amazes me what people search for and then click on ads which have in no way anything in common of what they queried. Sometimes I think people don't read the ads before they click. But, I am not here to judge...I just wanted to point out the importance of a good negative keyword list. If anyone has any funny negative lists to share, please do so. Maybe it is just me though...is it possible that I am the only person out there that can be amused by a good negative keyword list?
