How to Use Negative Keyword Lists in Google Ads to Save Money & Improve Your Return on Ad Spend – Main Street ROI

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Video Transcription

Hi everyone.

00:02

It’s Phil Frost from Main Street ROI.

00:04

And today we’re going to share a Google ads tip that will save you money and ensure your ads are getting in front of the right audience.

00:11

If you’re not already doing this in your account, then I can guarantee you’re going to find a lot of wasted ad spend.

00:17

That’s the bad news.

00:19

The good news is that by going through this process each month, you’ll keep improving your targeting and in turn, you’ll be improving your return on ad spend.

00:28

Now I’m going to let our ad analyst Riley show you how it’s done.

00:34

Hey, this is Riley with Main Street ROI.

00:36

And today’s tip is probably the easiest way to save money with Google ads and often not done by business owners who are running their own ads.

00:45

And it’s so easy to do and this is how you do it.

00:47

So this is really just about reviewing search terms and adding negative keywords.

00:52

So what are negative keywords? How can we organize them in a way that makes sense and is easy to manage? That’s what this is about.

00:58

So when reviewing search terms to search, terms are basically what people typed into.

01:04

Google that matched for your keyword and these should be reviewed because if people are typing in things that are not relevant for your business and your ad, your ads are showing up, and people are clicking on your ads, then you’re essentially paying for traffic that you don’t want to get anyway, which is really just a waste of money.

01:20

So what we want to do is review those search terms to see what’s relevant and what’s not relevant, and add those as negative keywords.

01:29

Now the best way to organize negative keywords in my opinion is to just add them to a negative.

01:34

Keywords list, because then that list can just be added to multiple campaigns, so you don’t.

01:41

You don’t have to do this for multiple campaigns.

01:43

You can add it to the one list.

01:44

You add that list to multiple campaigns and you’ve just saved yourself a lot of time so.

01:51

First, let’s create a negative keywords list.

01:54

So we’ll go to tools and settings negative keyword list.

02:00

And you hit that plus icon here.

02:03

So I was actually just going to create a competitors list.

02:07

We already have one here, but if I did want to create a negative keywords list, I would just type in.

02:15

A name here and something to note is that you you have to actually add in at least one negative keyword in order for this list to save.

02:23

So because there’s no negative keywords here, if I tried to click save, it would just delete the list, so.

02:30

To actually do that.

02:31

So yeah, but we do have a competitors list here already.

02:34

So these are two negative keywords list.

02:36

If you actually click into it, you’ll see the the negative keywords that have already been added to it.

02:41

And negative keywords function the same way that search keywords do in terms of match type.

02:46

So if you’re not familiar with match type, I would look up the Google search or the Google Support article on that.

02:52

Broad match is the broadest so.

02:56

Um.

02:57

EBay or anything like eBay.

02:59

Anything that has the same intent as eBay will be negative matched will not show up.

03:08

Cool.

03:09

Let’s go back out of here.

03:12

And to look at search terms, we’ll click on either individual campaigns or ad groups, or just all campaigns and search terms under the keywords tab.

03:24

And just review these to see what’s what’s relevant and what’s not relevant.

03:30

So, um, let’s say that.

03:36

Proxy brush was not a relevant search term.

03:39

Someone looking for that is not looking for something that we offer.

03:43

So if I wanted to add this as a negative keyword.

03:47

And in this case it wouldn’t be a a competitors list, this would just be a general.

03:51

Then I would select that list here and then hit save.

03:54

And the default setting when doing this is to add them as exact match negative keywords.

03:58

Which means that if exactly that phrase is ever typed again, our ad is not going to show up.

04:04

Or if something that is a very close variant of this phrase is typed in again, it’s still won’t won’t show one of our ads.

04:14

The use case for multiple.

04:17

Negative keywords lists would be if we had, for example, competitors campaign.

04:25

Then we would have you know, competitor businesses as keywords in that campaign, but we don’t want to show up for competitors in other campaigns.

04:34

So in that case a competitor’s negative keyword list would be added to every campaign other than the competitors campaign.

04:44

Whereas the like a general or universal negative keywords list would just pretty much be added to every every campaign.

04:50

This is where I will personally just put any negative keywords that are just not relevant to the business at all.

04:57

Including some kind of some standard negative keywords like how to or what is which for the most part are, you know information gathering keywords.

05:08

These are not people who are ready to purchase.

05:11

But yeah that’s that’s how you create a negative keywords list.

05:14

Very useful, not done often enough I think.

05:18

And and really better to to organize keywords in the list because sometimes I’ll see you know a lot of negative keywords added at individual campaigns.

05:27

Or ad groups and it’s just kind of messy.

05:28

So everything in a list makes it much cleaner, easier to manage, and easier easier to apply to new campaigns as well.

05:36

So if you have found this helpful, please let us know.

05:40

If you need any help with your ads, please reach out to us and we look forward to hearing from you.



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