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A podcast about Google Ads and PPC Advertising by Corey Frankosky from Surfside PPC.
What's up everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC podcast. Today is going to be episode number 30 and I'm going to be going through negative keywords. So, I would say try to start these with kind of the main questions I get about some of these topics. Negative keywords, the number one thing I can tell you is they are the best way to optimize your campaigns. And negative keywords are the way that you make sure that your ads aren't showing for competitive terms, lowquality terms, people looking for free things, people looking for reviews, people looking for costs. So, basically, there's people that are going to be in the decision-m process and they're looking for a quick question and answer or they're looking for something that generally doesn't convert that well when you see these types of words in your search terms report. So, we're going to go over how to find negative keyword ideas, how to add them, and some best practices throughout this podcast. So, negative keywords for Google ads, basically how you stop paying for searches that were never going to become a customer without cutting your actual campaign and hurting it. So, negative keywords, let's get into it. The number one thing, actually, before we get into anything is negative keyword match types are a little bit different. So as we add them just realize that broad match phrase match and exact match actually perform how they sound. So broad match if you put two words in there let's say I put see what as broad match negative keywords any search term that contains those two words anywhere will get removed. If I put see what as a phrase match if that phrase is anywhere in the search term if I put see what as an exact match it has to exactly match that term. So we'll go through match types in a little bit but they are different on the negative type. they do actually perform like keywords whereas you know positive keywords that you're actually targeting do perform a little bit differently per the match type. So what happens without negatives? This was just a few quick examples that I pulled. So I did plumber cost. Now these two you don't really have much control over because these are local services ads. But Angie average cost for plumbing pros. They basically have it built into their campaigns. Cost can be kind of a lowquality keyword at times because people are just trying to figure out you know how much is it going to cost me to repair this leak. Sometimes people see well it's probably going to cost you 500 bucks. And they say well I'm not paying anybody. So, they're just looking for a quick cost question. And a lot of times, there's going to be a follow-up that's going to be, you know, who should I hire as a plumber near me? Who's the best plumber in, you know, New York? Basically, where you're located, plumber near me. That's going to be your follow-up question. That's where you want to capture somebody. So, you don't want to spend the $15 on somebody searching the cost so that they go to your website, don't find the answer, leave your website, then go back to Google, start searching other things, and then finally search for a plumber when they're ready to book. But, you kind of want to reach them when people are looking to book and that's the process you want to be over and over and over again in Google ads. The next one is going to be tree removal for seniors. This one popped up for a local one by me. So I'll write tree service military discounts. It's probably one of those where you know they get probably not that many of these clicks in. The clicks are cheap enough. They do a really great job and they have a ton of reviews. So it's probably one of those a small investment every month for this. So not the end of the world to have this here. But tree removal for seniors and there's certain searches that indicate you know are there companies out there that do this with specials and discounts. They do have that here. If you do offer that, sometimes it's like, we don't want to pay for clients who are already looking for a discount. We want to pay for clients that are going to be massive jobs for our company. And then whoever's looking for a discount, they can hopefully find us. We'll create a tree removal for seniors page on our website. Plumber, we we'll make a average cost for different types of plumbing jobs on our website. Last one is going to be a, you know, particular competitor. So, Carolina Cool is a really big HVAC company local to me. When I did this search, we got two different ads coming up here. So, orange trucks is Carolina and Temperature Control. This is a unique kind of new we're looking at. I haven't seen this very often, but Coastal Air Plus, Myrtle Beach. So, another one there as well. So, the reason you add negative keywords is when people are searching for costs or they're looking for a discount or they're looking for a competitor, sometimes you just don't want to pay for those clicks. So, that's really where negative keywords come in. If I open up my page over here, so this is my Surfside PPC example account. I did run a performance max campaign. And you'll see from Performance Max, the searches were kind of all over the place. I kind of did a combination where I was trying to get people either for Google Ads Management or Google Ads Consulting. These are really expensive clicks. Generally, they're going to be like this. So, they're going to be more expensive clicks. I started getting things ads, my ad center, Skillshop, Google. These are things you can add, you know, negative out immediately. So, if you go to your actual campaigns, insights and reports, and your search terms report, within your search terms report is where you can find all the negative keywords you you really need. I was trying to do Google ads management and one of the categories I did in performance max was an asset group tree tree marketing agency tree service Google ads. So basically marketing for tree services was my goal. I ended up getting this tree removal for seniors 16 clicks on it only 52 cents per click. So very cheap clicks but it's one of those where these started popping in for a performance max campaign around Google ads management. Performance max gives you way less control. So there's a much better chance you're going to see junk in your search terms report. My current campaign that I'm running that I've been running for a little bit. Don't really get much from it and don't expect to at this budget. Probably have to 10x my budget to really make it worthwhile and work. But in this one, you can see my search terms. I am targeting dentists, med spas, plumbers, roofers, HVAC. I did a Google Ads tutorial about building this. But you'll see the searches and the clicks that I'm getting are a little bit better for this. Dental digital marketing agency. Two clicks on four impressions. Dental marketing company USA. Don't really love these searches. So, the clicks aren't over ly cheap like dental marketing agency USA dental marketing firm not terrible but ultimately what I would rather have and not even PPC for med spas is I want PPC agency for med spas pay-per-click agencies for dentists Google ads agency for dentists because that's really the service that I provide much better dental marketing agency I start reaching really broad where people are looking for website social media SEO Google ads meta ads which I can do a lot of those things but ideally I'm getting Google ads clients so there's a lot here for clicks impressions that not really the thing I want to target ultimately. But if we come back over here to our campaign status all and look at all of our search terms, we'll look at a few examples and just like if you see this one ad AD, somebody searching ad, there's no intent behind the search. 19 cents four clicks, 19 cents per click. So I paid.7 cents on it. Basically, we want to get rid of ad. Digital marketing tutorial for beginners. I may say anybody that's searching anything for beginners, I want to get rid of right now. The last one is going to be anybody who's searching anything specifically for seniors. We want to get rid of that. as well. Let's see if we can go and find one more. So, here's one more. Ashley Brock Paid Ads Academy. If I come in here and say, okay, we're going to add these as a negative keyword to the campaign level. We can add them to a negative keyword list. I named a negative keyword list account level that I applied to multiple campaigns. So, that's what we can do here. That's the best way to apply these negative keywords cuz do I really ever want to target any of these in my account? The answer is no. So, create a negative keyword list at the account level. You're like, how do we do that? Very easy. Save a new list. Apply negative keywords. I'll make call it account level example. Now we're adding it to a negative keyword list. A brand new negative keyword. What I can do for the different negative keyword match types is if I say let's exclude Ashley Brock, any search term that contains the words Ashley and Brock will be excluded automatically from my campaigns. So if I'm like I don't want to target anybody who's searching for her paid ads academy, I don't want to target it. So that's what I can do. The next one is going to be tree removal for seniors. I can just say anytime somebody is typing in seniors, I can remove that as a broad match negative keyword. Any search term that types that you know somebody is looking for something for seniors, I can remove that from my campaign and really from my account with this negative keyword list. Now, for beginners, what I can do is use a negative phrase match keyword and just say, okay, anybody who's searching the phrase for beginners anywhere in, you know, in the search, I want to make sure they're excluded from my campaign. So, that's a phrase match negative keyword. Last but not least is exact match negative keyword. You don't want to exclude, you know, some of these as exact match negative keywords. We don't really get people searching seniors as, you know, a search that's coming in and triggering ads. We get tree removal for seniors. Google ads, you know, marketing services for seniors. I don't know if anybody's really searching that, but I can say, okay, if anybody's searching anything for seniors, rather just excluded from my campaign altogether. One word, broad match negative. If anybody is searching for somebody else's name, another, you know, it could be a doctor, a medical practice, a competitor, it has two words, words in it. I could do Ashley Brock. If somebody types in Ashley paid ads academy Brock, this will be excluded because those two words were included in the search. This is a negative broad match keyword with multiple words in it. Negative phrase match. Exactly what it sounds like. If somebody types in marketing for beginners, Google ads for beginners, this is going to get removed. If they type in beginners Google ads, it's not going to get removed. So just the for beginners, anytime somebody uses that phrase, it gets removed from our campaign or our account. You can also add these at the ad group level as well. Well, last but not least, the exact match. So, count level example. We save this. We go to our tools. We go to our shared library and our exclusion lists. And you can see I have a couple here. Each negative keyword list is applied to whichever campaigns you want. So, I call this one account level. If I do the account level example, I say I want to apply this to campaigns and apply it to every campaign just, you know, just basically across your account. And that's how you do it. And then if you create new campaigns, you need to add this negative keyword list to it. So, it's not going to default add things to the to the account level or to your campaigns. You need to actually do that part manually. It's just the way that I do it in all of my accounts that I'm managing. So, you can apply these to campaigns. Click on them and there we go. Now, the other thing you can do is at the admin level, account settings, you can add a thousand negative keywords here that get excluded from shopping performance max and search campaigns. So, you can add up to 1,000 at the account level. These are actual account level negative keywords. This is where AI can come in handy and just kind of say, "Hey, I'm looking to add account level negatives." Go through the historic data in the account, find some of the main searches and main things that are wasting budget. And you can pull out a lot really quickly with account level negative keywords. So, let's come back over to our presentation here and kind of finish this off because basically all we'll do in the Google Ads interface today. Basically, the the next few things, protect your targets, pick the match type. So, just make sure you understand the way different match types work. So, if you're targeting, you know, tire installation near me as a phrase match keyword, people may be searching for tire stores, tire brands, all sorts of different things. And you may say, "I want to make sure somebody's looking specifically for a tire service." So, what you want to do is get rid of other tire stores, competing tire shops, and just basically go after people that are actively looking for tire installs, tire repair, tire replacement services. So, that's kind of the main thing you want to look for. Write down your do not block words first. So, you know, it's one of those things where you can always keep a list and just kind of say, "We need to make sure that these keywords and these individual words like installation, install, replace, repair don't ever get removed from our campaigns because that's going to end up hurting us in the long run. Next up is basically building a starter list before scratch. Another way that AI can be helpful is just saying, you know, can you build me an initial list of 50 negative keywords and what it really helps with is you can add the DIY, howto, what is, jobs, salary, people looking for information or something other than what you're selling. You want to remove before you ever launch your campaigns. There's no reason to really spend money on, you know, parts, use, Reddit, any of these different searches that are just never going to convert for you. Last but not least, mine your search terms report weekly. Go into the campaigns, go to your search terms, and look at all of your different search terms and make sure you're adding negative keywords all the time. Metal roof cost calculator, you basically can go in and say, "Okay, we want to make sure anybody searching for a calculator, we remove altogether." If you want to put a calculator on your website, great. You don't want to spend $30, $40, $50 on somebody searching for a cost calculating type click. So look at the most expensive search terms. Look for irrelevant search terms. Use AI to help you mine your search terms as well and just consistently add negative keywords into your account into your negative keyword list directly to your campaigns. And you can even add them to the ad group level. I can go into my medical and home services here, go right to my dentist search terms and say, okay, let's add some of these things to the ad group level. So these are negative keywords. This is Seride PPC podcast episode number 30. If you have any questions about anything, please leave them in the YouTube comment section. Thank you for subscribing to my podcast, following along, and we will have episode 31 out next week, and I will see you then.