Surely the idea of a PPC campaign is to drive traffic to my website so that I generate revenue through my website?

Well yes that is partially true, however with every PPC campaign comes much responsibility, queue Yoda voice.

If you think about what you log onto Google to search for, sometimes its for research, others its because you’ve seen the advert other times its because you already know what you want to buy.

Most of us, however, are at the research phase and we’re a long way off looking to buy anything.

In 2009 it was reported that 25% of all searches were totally brand new, and in 2013 this had dropped to 15%.

If we fast forward another 3 years we could say that this would of dropped a little further to around 10%.

That said if you think using the exact match within the Google Adwords platform is the way to go, you are wrong.

Exact Match means just that, and it also means you will be missing out on some relevant traffic from searches looking for you in ways you hadn’t thought of.

Spending the time to build up a negative keyword list will:

• Save you a lot of money (believe us PPC is an money drain, no matter what your budget Google will spend it).
• Increase in click through rates, as you are targeting more of the people that want your products/services.
• Increase your Quality Scores, this is important so that Google keeps your ads live and you reach the right audience.
• Increase your ROI.

When it comes to your search types, use both a broad and a phrase match search.  The combination of the two search types will give you an idea as to what terms are triggering your advert.  You want to ideally say clear of the exact search as we have already identified this could mean you missing out on valuable traffic.

Finding your negative keywords

This is relatively straight forward, all you need to consider is when do you want your advert to be found.  Consider the following:

• You don’t want to be found for services which you don’t offer i.e. “free”
• You don’t wish to be found for the more adult searches “porn” etc
• Does your advert really need to show in a particular geographic area?
• Remove yourself from the research stage i.e. reviews.

A lot of your negative keywords will come from common sense and will also come your own industry experience.

If you are still unsure you can always the Google Search tool within the Adwords platform this shows a list of recent searches that your advert has been displayed for.  You can then add some or all of these terms to your negative keywords tool.