Understanding Adwords - Part VI: Being Positive About Negative Keywords

When I first started learning how to use Google Adwords, I read about negative keywords. What these keywords do is prevent your ad from showing if your negative keyword appears in the search. In google, this is achieved by adding a minus sign (-) in front of the keyword. For example:

zeppelin
-led

In this case, if someone is looking for led zeppelin, your ad will not appear. If you type in zeppelin airships, your keyword would be triggered. At first when I learned about negative keywords, I thought "why would I want to get less clicks and impressions?". After reading Perry Marshall's The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords, and applying some of his negative keyword techniques, I found that my ROI (return on investment) improved substantially. So, for our example above, if I was selling items that revolved around old fashion zeppelin aircrafts, I would not want to pay for clicks that people who are looking for led zeppelin information. This targets my audience much more and provided me with more quality clicks as well as improved my CTR (click-through-rate), which is important for ad position and cost! Perry Marshall has a good free online course focusing on this and his eBook cannot stress it enough. Sign up here!