One of my guilty pleasures is looking through the search query reports (SQR) of an AdWords campaign for the cringe-worthy search queries that led to someone clicking on a PPC ad. Really Google? You felt that goat transportation cost was related to my keyword of freight costs? Or that a babe cam search should show my ad for digital camera? Sadly, these matches and worse can happen if you lack proper negative keywords.
This screenshot shows what happens when your campaign does not have enough negative keywords. It is just as important to have negative keywords as it is to have regular keywords.
- People really DO click on anything and everything, including these off-target ads, and the advertiser gets charged for that click.
- Most people are smart enough to not click, so the advertiser isn't directly charged. They just get hit when it comes to their quality score (affecting your cost per click and ad ranking) , which is based in part on your clickthrough rate (CTR). If nobody is clicking on your ads, Google is apt to lower your quality score and increase your cost per click.
I'm going to help you brainstorm and greatly expand your negative keyword list. Evan Steed, co-founder of Meathead Movers, has been brave enough to let me look at his AdWords account and share some real-life examples with you here (and in my February 29th SMX presentation) from an account with no negative keywords. Meathead Movers is based near my hometown on the central coast of California, and they do some awesome things in the community, including moving women out of domestic violence situations for free. That's always impressed me, and I'm glad to be able to give something back to a local business.
Start with the Search Query Report
Download your search query report, and review what people actually entered to trigger your ad. You'll find some good candidates for negative keywords here, and you can start developing organized negative keyword lists.
Go Beyond the Search Query Report to Find Negative Keywords
I use the search query report for gathering negatives I had missed, and to find ideas for entire classes of negative keywords. This all started when I found "honeymoon with a stranger" in a search query report, found out it was a movie title, and got the idea to search IMDB for other titles containing honeymoon. Suddenly I had "zombie honeymoon", "honeymoon for three", and a large variety of other keywords in my negative keyword list. I saw lots of honeymoon resort ads showing for these queries, and realized not too many people were using this method, and started thinking of other ways to find negative keywords.
I prefer to have a good negative keyword strategy in place before I even launch a campaign, to prevent some of these stupid clicks from ever happening. Here are some of the resources I use.
The first resource is an engaged brain. Words often have many meanings, and this can cause you trouble. If you are marketing only to the United States, it's tempting to dump a list of all countries except the US into a list, but remember that Georgia is both a US State and a country. Also, make sure that you don't use the same word in your campaign as in your negative keyword list. Microsoft AdCenter has a nice feature that will alert you to these keyword conflicts.
Existing Negative Keyword Lists
Review existing negative keyword lists that other people have generated. If you do nothing else, review these lists. You'll find near-universal keywords (like ebay, craigslist, sex, porn), keywords to exclude job seekers (resume, position, salary, job), keywords to exclude information seekers (how to, about, what is, how do I), and many more.
- Engine Ready Negative Keyword List
- 200+ Negative Keywords to Consider for B2B PPC
- Plastic Surgery negative keyword list. This list has a lot of celebrity names, which can be useful in all types of campaigns. Meathead gets queries about when did a certain actor move to Los Angeles, for example.
- 150+ Negative Keywords for Software Selling AdWords Campaigns
- Not explicitly a negative keyword list, but a collection of banned word lists for forums. You probably don't want your ads showing for these types of NSFW words.
Geography Lists
This is helpful for excluding people searching outside of your area of service. Even though Meathead geo-targeted their ads to appear only where they offered service (they only offer moving services in the state of California), people are looking to move from California to another state. Lists like this are also helpful in building your regular keyword list, as you can easily find all of the counties in a state, and all of the cities in each county, and develop targeted ad groups for your product or service.
- List of all countries in the world
- States and provinces in North America
- List of US counties by state
- Links to several lists of cities and counties for each state
- Another plain text list of cities and counties in each state
- List of California Cities by County
Movie Lists
I use IMDB's title search and check Feature Film, TV Movie, and TV series to get the most common titles without being bogged down in every single TV episode title ever made.
In the display options at the bottom, I choose to display compact and sort by number of votes descending. This gets you a list of the most popular movies at the top of the list, and you can easily copy the titles that make sense for your list.
Music Lists
Leo's Lyrics does a good job of listing song names in a compact format. In this example, with so many titles being just "move", I'd consider adding some artist names to a keyword list, along with the words lyrics, artist, and album.
Book Lists
For books, I haven't found a great way to get just the most popular titles in an easy manner. I'd just scan Amazon and Barnes and Nobel online and sort by popular items.
Wikipedia Lists
Wikipedia is a great source of lists on nearly any topic. Search "list of [keyword] wikipedia" and you'll often get a great list, along with references for other sites that have similar lists. If you are an animal shelter that only has cats and dogs, you might go for the list of domesticated animals in Wikipedia so your ad doesn't show for people wanting to adopt a pig (and you might want to head to their list of cat and dog breeds as well when you develop your regular keywords).
Government Lists
Governments are great for more than just good backlinks. For regulated industries, they often have lists of approved companies in that industry. You can use that for a negative list in your branding campaign, and as a keyword list in a campaign targeting people searching for your competitors. Another handy feature is that there is often an export option in these lists to download in a text or CSV format.
Top Lists
Forbes and other sites have endless top 10 and top 100 lists of all kinds of subjects. In Evan's case, I'd use some of the celebrity names as negatives to block his ads from being shown when someone searches for information on a celebrity moving to Los Angeles or Santa Barbara or another of his target cities.
Affiliate Lists
Some affiliate programs have detailed lists of negative keywords that can provide inspiration. If I were advertising for something related to Whitney Houston, I'd add the list of JC Whitney (an auto parts retailer) variations to my negatives list.
Paulson Management Group and Link Connector have several lists of negative keywords for specific campaigns.
Finding alternate meanings
You don't want your financial institution showing up for queries for blood banks and food banks. How to think of some of those other meanings for words ahead of time?
Wikipedia Disambiguation pages
Google Queries
Meathead has a new service for packing in addition to just moving. They know they need to exclude Green Bay Packers, but want ideas of what other meanings packing can have beyond the moving industry. Searching for [packers -"green bay" -moving -movers] yields a company in their service area called Island Packers, agriculture packing, and a restaurant called Packers.
Vocabulary lists
Meathead had a query for moving furniture. They don't focus on rearranging furniture, so needs to have an exclusion list for their campaigns that focuses on furniture. An ESL vocabulary list provides a nice text-based list for easy copying and brainstorming.
Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers provides some natural-language ideas for negative keywords that you might have otherwise missed.
Keyword Research Tools
Soovle shows suggestions from any number of engines (you can choose) for your keyword. It's another way of quickly spotting off-topic trends.
Übersuggest scrapes Google Suggest and other suggestion services to come up with lists.
Short Words
If you have a short keyword or an acronym, check to see if it's also an acronym for something else, a stock symbol, or an airline code.
Link Builder and SEOs
You also don't want to show your ad to people looking to build links related to your keywords. Rand's post has a number of phrases you'd want to exclude, like "submit url" "add site" "suggest a url".
Trending Topics
Keep an eye on Google Trends and Twitter Trends for a new phrase that has come into prominence. Google seems to not display ads for suddenly trending topics much of the time (like not showing ads when you searched for [cruise ship italy] right after the cruise ship sank), but it's also good to add in negatives to keep yourself covered rather than completely trust in Google's algorithms.
Bonus Round! Tools to Harvest Data
Not every site is going to have a nice plain text list ready for you to copy and paste. I've found a couple of tools that are helpful for harvesting data and making it easily usable.
Dafizilla Table2Clipboard lets you easily paste data with its formatting to Excel, where you can then manipulate the data for just the information you need.
Outwit Hub offers a variety of ways for you to extract data from web pages. This tool deserves several blog posts of its own on its overall uses for SEO, not just in collecting keywords.
Wrapping Up
Whew! There's a lot to think about when finding negative keywords. Is it all worth it? Check out an interview with Ken Jurina with case studies where using tens of thousands of negative keywords has helped businesses save 5% to 40% on their PPC.
What are some of your favorite ways to find negative keywords, and what are some of the worst search queries you have seen?
Hi Keri,
Thanks for the insightful post, a few tips from my end as well -
PS - I have noticed a lot of marketers who place conversion tracking code on the landing pages but not the GA code which is kind of a shame as they are a source of some amazing data out there
- Sajeet
Great post Keri.Worth Bookmarking. But i would suggest extreme caution while using someone negative keywords list. Negative keywords can easily break a campaign. You need to be as careful about selecting negative keywords as you are while selecting positive keywords. The decision of selecting the negative keywords must be based on your marketing goals, acquistion strategy and budget. You just can't use someone negative keyword list. For example one of my client sells alternative clothing and Lady Gaga fans are his great customers, so we bid on Lady Gaga on display networks. We bid on ebay and many of our competitors brand name. We also bid on informational queries to capture prospects in the early stage of the buying cycle. So the keywords which are positive for us may not be positive for you and vice versa.
You've made a great point here, one that I didn't emphasize emough. I did mention the first resource to use is your brain before using any of these, but I should have expanded on that more. None of these tactics are ones where you can just copy a list wholesale and have it all be appropriate for your particular situation.
Good point here. I am fairly new to blogging. After reading this post and your supplementary example, I got definitely got the negative keywords all wrong! Thanks to Keri too for the original post.
Some really good ideas here...many I hadn't thought of. Thank you! As you nad SEOTakaways said above, keyword lists can be dangerous if the brain is not engaged. That said, I've put together an "open source" negative keyword list hosted on a Google spreadsheet. Anyone is free to use it and add to it in the "suggestions" tab.
Make sure to note that there are many tabs along the bottom for different categories of negative keywords.
Thanks Ben!
I'm #50! Enjoy your cupcakes!
I just got my cupcakes. Thank you! https://twitpic.com/8tqea1
Keri, A huge thank you for the post and guidance! I look forward to implementing and tracking the results. Best, Evan
When I first started with AdWords, way back in ’06, I was a total Meathead! Still am actually. I thought of impressions as free branding/advertising, clicks as "expensive" and had no clue about conversion tracking. It’s wonderful and insightful posts like this that I continue to learn from.
Couple examples of some Meathead Mistakes I’ve made along the way.
1.) Listening to Google Google’s Recommended Keyword Additions:“You can get 105,000 more impressions if you add this list of keywords”
Meathead Mentality: 105,000 impressions! Woah, and if no one clicks on them it’s free! YES!!
Obviously, this is the exact wrong way to go with a PPC campaign, unless you’re look to shoot your quality in the foot. As Keri said, “would you really want to trust Google that much…”
Lesson learned: Sometimes less is better.
2.) Phrase match instead of broad match If your goal is huge numbers of impressions, by all means go with broad match. I’m not saying there isn’t a time and place for broad match. However, I’ve learned to target search queries for people who are actually looking to convert and I primarily aim at them with phrase match keywords.
And now for the missing component, negative keywords. Completely absent in my campaign before Keri knocked me upside my head (jk). I’ve completely reversed by AdWord priority hierarchy: primary goal is conversions, clicks are still expensive, but you can combat that by reducing the quantity of impressions and focus on quality. Ultimately the focus is CTR to Conversions. I think Dr. Pete nailed it with, “use negatives to scoop up what’s left”.
Really looking forward to seeing the impact of implementing the ideas you outlined in this post, Keri! Great job!
Excellent post Keri!
LOTS of very valuable info in there, especially for in-house PPC folks!
I often get asked to give advice about PPC optimisation, and negative KW's is a strong part of what I usually find what I look at a clients campaign!
Our of all your advice though, this one made me smile the most:
"The first resource is an engaged brain. "
Never a truer word spoken (erm... written, sorry!).
Cheers,
Mike.
Keri, admittedly, you just opened my eyes to a lot more "implications" for unwanted exposure without taking time to consider negative keywords!
Excellent post!
Awesome post Keri! So many great places to look that I would have never thought of. Bravo!
Hi Keri,
Thanks you for the Great post, I've added many of your suggests of negative words to our existing campaigns.
My currently working for a company who fit solar window films, where negative key words are almost more important than the key words because we don’t want to be listed for:
As well as all the usual terms you listed in your general list.
We also perform weekly checks of matched search queries in Google Analytics for terms we have missed and them to the negative keyword list. If you are running big campaigns, I would suggest monitoring this more regularly, especially in the early states of the campaign or when major semi-related news items are released.
We check the Google suggestion regularly, in most case we use the suggestions to add to the negative keyword lists.
Keep up the good work,
K
Thanks for your comment! Your product is a great example of the need for negatives. I'm glad my post was able to help you find a few more to add!
"Most people are smart enough to not click, so the advertiser isn't directly charged. They just get hit when it comes to their quality score (affecting your cost per click and ad ranking) , which is based in part on your clickthrough rate (CTR). If nobody is clicking on your ads, Google is apt to lower your quality score and increase your cost per click."-
Well advertisers actually don't hurt their Quality Score, if people make a search for a keyword they don't have in their account (even though the ad shows up due to broad-match/extended broad-match). The only time where Quality Score is effected is when the search terms matches the search query exactly.
That said. Great stuff and Negative keywords are vital for ROI, but not for Quality Score optimization.
Seconding Frederik's point about Quality Score -- last time I checked, Google only calculates Quality Score based on CTR for exact match queries.
Still, negative keywords are crucial for ROI, so thanks for the comprehensive post on this topic!
Also: You didn't mention WordStream's free negative keyword tool. I work at WordStream, but it's a useful tool for negative keyword discovery regardless, so I thought you might want to include it.
Thanks!
Thanks Frederik and Elisa for pointing that out, and so sorry I appear to have misunderstood the quality score.
Here's the Wordstream negative keyword tool for those who would like to check it out, along with a post Elisa made about controlling negative keywords. Thanks for the comments!
No worries, it's a very common misunderstanding! Thanks for the link!
Elisa,
Could you point to some references on this issue of how effective use of negatives does not improve Quality Score?
This seems so well engrained in my reading and years of work (and numerous product and book claims) - so if this is actually true (prove-able, proven / referenced by different authorities), then I'll take it to heart.
I look forward to reading up on this.
PS - great post and great discussion!!
Keri,
It was nice meeting you. Your presenation and blog post are awesome! If you get a chance, I would love for you to take a look at my search query mining tool: https://queryminer.com.
It analyzes large Search Query Reports and returns Negative Keyword suggestions.
Thanks!
Chad
Thanks for attending the session and I appreciate the resource. Nice meeting you as well!
Great article! One caution though: I'd be careful with the pre-made lists of negative keywords. Right off the bat I saw "how to" as one of the negatives, yet in one of my campaigns, "how to _____" is one of my best-converting phrases.
If I could redo this post again, I'd have an image of your brain as the first tool to emphasize even more than you need to examine each of these resources for if it makes sense for you. I agree that what works for one person as a negative may be the basis of a campaign for another person.
Grande, Keri! I just love creative thinking, diving into IMDB... Brilliant.
I spend some hours a month there for my FB interaction (mostly my "Z" film mates ;-) and never thought of IMDB as a work-space. Now I may see it from a second perspective. Tnx!
One of my clients is a moving company, and I was so glad to see that they didn't appear in that screenshot :)
Really great, comprehensive list of tactics. Love the IMDB/lyrics suggestions - I had a client whose name is shared with a popular band, and that led to a mess of essential negatives.
I'm personally finding that I go more and more phrase/exact match and use negatives to scoop up what's left, but it's vitally important to run those search query reports, no matter how focused your ad groups.
Hi Keri, nice post some good information on negative keyword list building. I think the thing is most agencys have huge lists of negative keywords per niche. It is amazing that some companies such as eBay for example and some other online retailors seem to have no negatives at all and braod match on every thing.
But one area of negatives which I would highly advise on is any adult keywords even slightly "Sexy" style keywords some times things can slip under the net such as "babe" it could be a movie or something which a client will not like at all for example.
Great post KeriI find most people are too lazy to do proper keyword research let alone negative keyword research
Yes excellent very useful :-)
Personally when possible prefer to only use phrase and exact macth to lessen this problem. Exact should not be an issue, surely!? However expect Google manages to come up with some classic mismatches for phrase as well as broad match keywords.
Once again, many thanks, on to this tomorrow...
I never realized the importance of negative keywords until I read your article. I would not have even thought of things like employment, porn, etc. as being an issue. Thanks for the information.
Everybody likes a good list!
Great post keri, it's important which keywords and how to find out as per search with cpc, where we're going paid search adv. really helpful. Thanks
Hey Keri,
A great post, thank you! For niche products, say a certain kind of travel product, for a specific demographic using the Google Keyword tool and searching for say 'holiday' can be of immense use. Helps keep out high-volume and unwanted traffic.
It's always difficult but I've found being brutal is best. There are some keywords that look like they could lead to a conversion but over time these can really add up. Biting the bullet and adding them as negative pays off in the long-run.
Thanks again.
Keri! Very timed post I must say... yesterday, I was helping my friend with his Adward campaign and what all I figured out was the same... the lack of research on the negative keywords and this make the bounce rate of the campaign up to 90%.
I don’t want to repeat the stuff but I must say finding and adding the negative keyword in the list is even more important them finding the list of potentially convertible keywords.
A Very Good post!
Wow, thanks for the immense resrource Keri! I'm starting my first ever PPC campaign this year (just a small one for a book I've written) and I'm even more excitied to get started now.
I like this article, makes me think about how to improve your adwords campaigns. I wonder if a similar strategy can also be applied to SEOweb site?
I do know of people using it for their organic content. If you are selling calico fabric for example, you might not want to include the word cat in your content so that Google doesn't accidentally associate you with calico cats instead of calico fabrics.
Great post. Makes me realize I should be much more proactive with locking down our potential negative keywords instead of waiting for them to popup little by little.
This is awesome Keri! I love the article.You're missing a link to a huge negative keywords list though: https://www.webmechanix.com/negative-keyword-list
Ahhhh, the darn Google Future Blog Post Search feature was broken when I wrote this post. :) (the post you referenced came out about a year after I wrote this post). Glad you liked the article!
Great post!
I like this article, makes me think about how to improve your adwords campaigns allways.
No doubt, a nice read that helps out a lot. Keri, I need a help about my campaign. I am running an Adword Campaign in which I found too many irrelevant url queries like "https://www.example.com/" or "https://www.example.com/articles/index.html".. I need to inquire is there any helpful way to block such type of URL queries. These queries ruined my whole campaign, please help ASAP.
I'd try entering them as negative keywords. There's also a phone number for Google Adwords that you can call these days, and they should be able to help.
Our CEO runs the adwords campaigns for our main site. He had never gone through and weeded out negative keywords. I offered to do it for him and found $10,000 worth of clicks on terms we'd "paid" for that were completely irrelevant. It was a daunting task because we have thousands and thousands of keywords, so there were close to 20,000 keywords to sif through. But a few days work is definitely worth $10K saved!
Thanks for the comprehensive post. There are definitely some ideas here I hadn't thought of before.
Wouldn't you also say that the best people to determine negative keywords are those intimately familiar with the business? I don't see how an agency would be able to pinpoint certain terms as being irrelevant. They might be able to hit a few, but only an insider is going to find them all (IMHO).
I'd think that both sides could have good contributions. The agency who does this a lot should hopefully have some tactics for a lot of initial negatives that the business may not have ever considered, and the business would have some specific insight that the agency hadn't encountered before.
One thing I didn't write about here was two different types of businesses that share the same keyword communicating with each other. My brother has a product called the OpenTracker, which is related to GPS and ham radio tracking. There's an open-source website analytics program that is also called OpenTracker. I contacted the analytics people and gave them a list of our related keywords and suggested they use them as negatives -- anyone searching for n1vg, aprs, ham radio, etc. was searching for our OT and not theirs. We both came out ahead, since we weren't bidding against them, and they weren't bidding on the wrong terms.
You are awesome! I always say that negative keywords are one of the most important - if not THE most important part of a campaign but I thought I exhausted my resources for finding negatives until I saw this post. You have some great points! Thanks!
Thanks for the kind words Cody, so glad to have been able to help!
Thanks for sharing this amazing info.
Great post! Broad match gets broader by the day it seems. Speaking from the perspective of an ex-googler, broad match should only be used by folks who know what they are doing, otherwise, you are wasting money.
The best case scenario is that you get your broad match words to convert well and provide a positive ROI. BUT!... you then have multiple queries driving that positive ROI. You will be better served, and drive significantly more profit if you separate out all those queries and bid them individually based on their value. This is the same effort as splitting search and search network into different campaigns. Negative keywords are a great way to improve this performance/reduce the amount of queries that you have to bid 1 keyword based on.
I typically spend a very small amount (>5%) of my budget on broad match and use those broad match campaigns only for keyword discovery to feed into exact and phrase match. Probably 80% of my budget is spent on exact match, and the rest on phrase.
Good articles, very useful thank you
Great post Keri!
Anyone who is accountable for PPC spend and is not looking at this type of data to build out search exclusions is crazy, even if you are not using and broad match!
Chris
pretty interesting twist on Adwords. I'll have to take a deeper look at ours and see how this would apply. Thanks Keri!
I can one up your goat keyword. Google thinks the keyword "accountant" is a match for the search phrase "google account", not to mention "free hotmail account", "my att account", "itunes account login" and I could go on and on. In fact in a lot of these cases, the average position was between 1 and 3. It also kind of shows, you can A/B test until the goats come home, but a lot of people don't read the ads anyway....
One of my favourite things in the world is going through the search terms that have actually delievred traffic and adding negatives (or creating new adgroups off the back of them).
An eye opener. You have some really great ideas for researching negative keywords. I never would have thought about Wikipedia in a million years.
Brilliant post. Lots of good ideas. Thank you
Great post! Thanks for including all the different places we should look when creating a negative list. Brilliant!
Just this week, I found this site with a list of common male and female first names, as well as surnames. The first names list was easy to save and manipulate into a simple ascii text list that I could add. In my case, bidding on broad match of "certified public accountant" was getting triggered for names, such as "Norm Miller CPA".
Some of the first name's were only 2 letters and could be negative's for state abreviations, and other names like "Dakota" could be mistaken for locations as well. So make sure you know the contents of any list before importing.
Here is the link for anyone interested....
https://names.mongabay.com/
Interesting stuff Keri, it is something I've been very aware of but not on this scale so resources will be a great help, much appreciated.
Great post, Keri! Thanks for sharing all of this valuable info in one place. :)
Love the pre-built negative keyword lists.
This is a feature AdWords should have built into their interface.
I'll have to disagree with you there. First, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and those existing negative keyword lists need to be examined for each client and each campaign. Second, would you really want to trust Google that much to determine the negative keywords? Based on the regular keyword suggestions I've seen them make, I'd stay far, far away.
It is always the user's responsibility to trust his/her better judgement to accept or decline Google's recommendations. Blindly clicking the ACCEPT button is never a good idea.
I think it would be very helpful to have a list of various buckets/sets for popular Movies, Music, Car brands & models, etc... Google could then say "x number of your keywords appear in one or more of the following lists that do not appear to be related to your websites topic. Review these lists and consider adding these as negative keywords"
I personally would find that useful.
Keri Thanks a lot for the insightful post!!!
Really great post Keri! Sphinn worthy I'd say;) Hope things are going awesome for you.
Thanks! I miss Sphinn, but you can give it an upvote over at Inbound if you have a moment. Things are going awesome on this end!
Brilliantly comprehensive! I love the challenge of figuring out potential negative keywords and you've got some great ideas that I've never tried.. thanks!
Glad to hear it! That was one of the main goals of this post -- to spark some new ways of thinking of finding negative keywords.
Thanks for writing this article...it really can't be said enough. It is shameful how many PPCers neglect negative keywords and the search query report. It's almost as heinous, if not more so, than neglecting to setup conversion tracking.
You guys are amazing!!!!!!