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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
September 2004, Volume 3, Issue 5

Pay per click advertising at iProspect.com.

Negative Matching: The Quiet, Yet Powerful Paid Search Strategy

by Ben Perry, Paid Search Manager, iProspect

You don’t have to look hard these days to find articles on formulating keyword bidding strategies, writing pay per click ad creative, or how to perform landing page testing. But there is another potent strategy for improving the results of your pay per click advertising campaigns, for which there has been very little commentary devoted – “negative matching.” Negative matching is the practice of identifying keywords on which you do NOT want your ads to be shown. Negative matching is actually Google’s term for this practice, with Overture calling these “keyword exclusions” – but the concepts are identical.

Why Use Negative Matching?

  1. The first reason to use negative matching is to prevent clicks from unqualified visitors. For example, suppose you are advertising for a cruise line and one of your keywords is “cruise.” You want users searching for “Caribbean cruise” and “Bahamas cruise” and any number of other cruise types. What you don’t want are users searching for “Tom Cruise” or “cruise missiles.” These users cost you money and have a very slim chance of converting once they hit your site. Negative matching can also be used to refine searches for legitimate products that your business simply doesn’t offer. If you sell Bahamas cruises, but not Disney cruises, you may want to negative match “Disney” so you don’t pay for users looking specifically for that type of cruise.


  2. The second reason to use negative matching is to improve click through rates, and thus performance, in Google AdWords. Because the ads are never shown on irrelevant searches that you’ve identified, you don’t rack up tons of impressions that never result in clicks. This can help both to increase position and trim costs in Google.
How to Select Negative Matches

  1. So how do you anticipate or uncover the negative keywords to add to your lists in Google and Overture? Your log files or Web analytics are two great places to start. You can look at the keyword phrases that actually referred users to your website from the search engines. The words that don’t make sense should stand out and those are prime candidates for negative matching.


  2. A second source is Google’s Sandbox – their keyword suggestion tool. Enter your targeted “positive” keywords, and Google provides other keywords that are related. By reviewing the list that Google returns, you can look for keyword phrases that would drive unqualified traffic to your site. To get the most out of Google’s tool, enter short lists of similar keywords into the tool. This type of input provides the best results.


  3. A third way to generate negative matches is to conduct queries on your top producing keywords. To use the previous example, if you search for “cruise” in Google, the 8th result in the natural listings is a page about Tom Cruise.


  4. Finally, a sophisticated way to generate negative matches is by examining your lowest converting keywords. If you’ve been running your campaign for a while and have enough data to know which keywords perform poorly, determine whether there are any similarities among them. A common outcome of this strategy is to get rid of words that are connotative of low cost. Unless your products are very competitive on cost, these words can often perform poorly. Negative matching words like “discount,” “cheap,” and worst of all “free,” can help you avoid paying for bargain hunters that aren’t likely to convert.
How to Execute Negative Matching

The way you execute negative matching differs between the Google and Overture interfaces. In Overture, you can add up to 15 “excluded words” to any given keyword on which you’re bidding. In Google, you’re not limited to 15 negative matches, as you can have up to 2,000 keywords of any type for any given AdGroup – including negatives. In Overture you can apply negative matches to groups of similar keywords pretty easily if you’re handy with a bulk sheet, but in Google it’s simple to do right in the AdWords interface.

Not too long ago, Google also added the ability to apply negative matches to whole campaigns. Again, this can be done in an Overture bulk sheet but you have that 15 negative keyword limit. Overture is set to release new matching options that will include the ability to negative match on the account level, so Overture users will soon have this functionality in their interface as well.

Used wisely and extensively, negative matching can provide a powerful filter for unqualified searchers you don’t want to visit your site. In the end that means fewer wasted clicks, lower costs and better returns on your pay per click advertising efforts.

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