Selecting Negative Keywords

1) Use negative keywords to make sure that your ad only shows up when the person is looking to buy your product.  

2) Negative phrase matching is slightly more complex than that, but can also be very helpful.  It might be prudent to put the brand name in quotations so that people searching just the brand will not see your ad?  This might seem counterintuitive to marketing, but there are examples where this is necessary.  For instance, if you are selling a brand that is getting a lot of press, chances are people are not looking to buy, but just looking to investigate what they’ve heard in the news.  It’s not always good to show your ad if you are not going to get a sale.  If someone just types “Brand name,” then you can put that as a negative phrase match.  However, if the person types “Buy Brand Name,” then your ad will show.  See the difference?  Now you are only attracting consumers.

3) You can also use negative keywords to filter out people who may be looking for your general category but not for your specific product.  For instance, if you are selling “vintage 80s movies,” then you may not want to show your ad when someone just enters “movies.”  You may want to add other negative keywords like decades (“90s, 70s, 60s, 50s”) to ensure that your ad only shows up when someone wants to buy 80s movies.

These are just some easy ways to consider utilizing negative keywords.  Your ad will show up when it is most relevant and it is simple to change negative keywords in order to filter down or expand visits to your website.