Let’s say that you attend a church in Charlotte, NC. and your pastor asks for your help in putting together a PPC campaign to boost awareness of the church and increase their membership. So you go ahead and set up a campaign, you do little bit of keyword research, and notice that there are some fairly well trafficked keywords that you can use. So you go ahead and put them in the campaign, and come up with your ad text.
Join the Charlotte Church
Your home from home
A couple of days later the pastor asks to see how well the campaign is going, so you pull up the AdWords campaign, and you both see that there’s a heck of a lot of traffic coming in, in fact it’s a good job that you set a daily budget. Proud of the job you’ve done, you decide to show off, and show the pastor around the analytics package that you set up on the site. It’s when you click on the PPC keywords searched that you realize that there’s a problem…
Your broad, un-geotargeted keywords “Charlotte Church” has been showing up whenever anyone has done a search for the Welsh singer of the same name, and the vague copy that you wrote has her fans clicking through, costing your church money.
So what could you have done? Well, for one you could have done a much better job of targeting your audience. But you should have also specifically not targeted the wrong audience. Negative keywords are designed for exactly this purpose. Examples that you could have used for this would have been -welsh, - singer, -pregnant (if you’re up on your pop culture news). Using these negative keywords would ensure that you’re not paying for traffic that you don’t want. Simply enter the negative keywords into the engine, and if they’re detected in the query, your ad doesn’t display.
If you think the example is too contrived, here’s another one. Let’s say you’re an attorney in Lincoln, NE. What negative keywords would you possibly want to use for your PPC campaign? How about -abraham? That’ll stop your ads showing up for all of those history buffs / report writing school children. Maybe even -town car, unless you work with auto accidents…
