Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

As many people know, pay-per-click campaigns can be a great way to drive traffic to your Web site. If done correctly, this traffic will be relevant, based on keywords that people are searching for in the search engines.

When setting up a pay-per-click campaign, keyword research must be conducted. While a campaign is running, routine changes and updates should be made. When deciding on keywords for your campaign it is also important to focus some time on discovering negative keywords. Negative keywords as defined by Google:

A negative keyword is a special kind of keyword matching option that allows you to prevent your ad from appearing when the specific terms are a part of the user’s search.

Negative key words should play a key role in your campaign. In most cases there are products or services similar to yours or at least similar in name. You do not want to pay for clicks that have no chance of creating a conversion and contributing to your ROI. Negative keywords can definitely improve your ROI. Essentially, they help you to more precisely target your audience.

Let’s look at a simple example. If your company sells greeting cards you would want to focus negative keywords on other types of cards that you do not sell. Some of these might include the words:

• -business
• -sports
• -baseball
• -camera

Therefore if someone searches for ‘business cards’ in the search engine, your ad will not appear since you have made ‘business’ a negative keyword.

The position your ad is placed in the sponsored links when advertising through a pay-per-click campaign is based on many characteristics, some of which are kept secret by the search engines. Some of them include how much you pay and your quality score, according to Google (who the others tend to follow). Your quality score is based on items such as CTR, relevance of your landing page and conversions. (Here are a few more Google AdWords Tips)

Negative keywords can help improve your CTR, with relevant clicks leading to conversions. If you can improve your CTR you will increase your quality score, paying less for your keyword placement. At the same time you will be improving your ROI since you will be targeting the correct users! Even though they are called ‘negative’ keywords, don’t let it fool you, there is nothing negative about them and they should definitely be included in your pay-per-click campaigns!

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