Pay Per Click Advertising - Understanding Negative Keywords

Paid search is one of the most popular ways of advertising your business online. It is a completely unique entity; unlike anything you'll find offline. By targeting particular search phrases you can focus your advertisements to ensure their only seen by those who you would want to come to your site.

There is one slight issue with this form of advertising though, irrelevant searches. They provide a two-fold issue for advertisers. First of all they will lower your Click through Rate (CTR). This can in turn raise your Cost per Click (CPC), which will leave you out of pocket. Secondly, it can lead to redundant clicks; essentially people who are searching for something else entirely and so leave immediately. This will of course end up costing you money.

So how can you avoid spending more than you need to on Pay per Click (PPC) advertising? Simple, define your campaign's negative keywords.

First things first, what is a negative keyword? Well, in the most simplistic terms it is a keyword that your search is showing for that you wouldn't want it to.

The aforementioned scenario might sound highly unlikely, but you'd often be surprised what gets thrown up on closer inspection. In this particular case of course you want to remove any reference to 'Holidays', thus this would become your negative keyword.

Ultimately negative keywords can run into the thousands, so don't expect it to be a quick process weeding them all out. The effort is well worth it though, as you should be rewarded with a campaign that performs efficiently with vastly reduced wastage; something that we can all see the benefit of.

Of course, not everybody has the patience to dedicate the hours needed to define and implement the negative keywords; some might not even know where to start. There are professional PPC services available that can manage your campaigns and have them running smoothly throughout. Of course this isn't going to be the cheapest option, but the eventual gains should more than justify any additional expense.

Paid search itself has grown a reputation for being a quick fire way of generating new business. It has an immediacy about it that is unequaled. Unlike your traditional forms of offline advertising, billboards, television, radio and the printed press, PPC offers you the opportunity to see results and make changes in real time. If there's a typo in your magazine article there isn't a whole lot you can do once it's sent, leading to a costly error; in a PPC ad you can change it within seconds, no hassle, no issues.

You can also track and analyze the success of your campaigns as they go along with a live stream of data coming through. So if one particular ad is hemorrhaging money for no good reason, you can pause it and make any changes necessary. If another is generating a lot of clicks that are converting, you can push more of your budget over to it and keep it ticking over.

So whilst negative keywords might not be the first thing that you think of when you start out on a PPC campaign, but their importance should not be overlooked. With advertising and marketing budgets being stretched to the limits and businesses looking for new avenues to gain more trade without the expense, paid search is increasingly becoming a part of company's future strategies.

Understanding that creating an advert isn't simply about the text you include within the ad copy, but also the negative keywords that you can't see is essential if you want any campaign to be a success. An investment in some stringent keyword research could well be an investment in your website's success.