Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Yahoo Sponsored Search and Google AdWords both provide tools to prevent your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising ads from showing on terms that are a waste of money or not applicable to your PPC campaign goals. That’s about it for similarities on this subject, as this feature has different names and functions in very different capacities at both Google and Yahoo.

Difference 1: Their Names: Yahoo calls their keyword exclusion tool ”excluded words” and Google calls it “negative keywords.”

Difference 2: Where They Are Put in the Account: Yahoo lets you put excluded words on the account level and/or the AdGroup level, while Google allows you to put negative keywords on the Campaign and/or AdGroup (note to Yahoo – Campaign level excluded terms are a must!).

Difference 3: How they actually work: The way the excluded/negative terms work is vastly different at Google and Yahoo, and can be a bit confusing.

First Google: you can enter negative keywords as broad, phrase and/or exact match. Adding a negative keyword as broad match prevents your ad from showing when that term is used anywhere in a search phrase, and exact match negative keywords will prevent that specific term from displaying your ad. Example: the broad negative keyword is bouquet – your ad will not show for any search with the word bouquet in it. For a phrase match example, if the negative keyword is the phrase “balloon bouquet” then your ad will not show for a search for balloon bouquet delivery, or cheap balloon bouquet; and if the negative keyword is [balloon], your ad will not show on any search for just the word balloon, but will show for the search balloons.

Now Yahoo, on the other hand, works very differently. If I was to exclude the word balloon, my ads would not show if someone were to search on just the term balloon or even balloons, UNLESS I was also advertising on the term balloon. If I exclude the term balloon, but advertise on the term helium balloon, my ad WILL show. Another example, if I exclude the term bouquet and am not advertising on any term that has bouquet in it, and someone were to search on balloon bouquet, the PPC ads would not show.

Powerful tools with fundamental differences can trip you up if you don’t know how they work. Using these tools incorrectly can cost you clicks, visitors & sales. Having a PPC management company like JumpFly who understands when to use these tools and how they can impact your account for good or bad is important.

View more JumpFly articles about Negative Match.

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Looking for positive ROI from your PPC campaigns? Then it’s time to start thinking negative! Are you using negative keywords in your accounts? If you are not, you should be, especially if your pay per click advertising accounts are heavily populated with broad match keywords. You can use negative keywords to filter out searches for products you don’t stock, for brands you don’t carry, or for customers you don’t want, just to name a few things you can exclude.

Let’s say you sell golf shoes. There are quite a few branded producers of golf shoes. You’ve got Nike, Adidas, FootJoy, Callaway, Ecco to name a few. So let’s say you are bidding on golf shoes in a broad or even phrase match variation. Your ads will be showing up for all those brands if people search for “adidas golf shoes” or “ecco golf shoes”, etc. But what if you don’t sell the Adidas brand? You are going to be paying to bring in a lot of annoyed searchers to your website expecting to find Adidas golf shoes because your ad is showing up under that search term. However, if you add “adidas” as a negative keyword, then your ad won’t even show up on Google for those searches. You can often filter out the searchers that are not a good fit for your business or service with a few simple negative keyword additions.

So where do you find these negative keywords? You can use the Google Keyword Tool to research potential negative keywords and quickly add them straight into your account. You can also run the Search Query Performance Report in your Google account and take a look at the results. You will see many of the keywords you already have in your account, but you will also see other keywords that are triggering your ads to show on Google. More often than not, you will see keywords that are not related to your product or service, or keywords that contain a brand you do not stock at all. You can then take these keywords that are not a good for your business and add them as negative keywords into your Ad Groups or at the Campaign level.

Sometimes you need to think negative to increase the positive.

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It is important to understand Google’s Negative Matching features in order to best refine your searches.

The negative match feature in Google ensures that your ads do not show when the search term entered includes certain keywords or phrases.  For example, one of the most common negative keywords we use is “free”.  If you are selling a new video game, chances are you are not going to want to appear when a user types in “free video games”.  In order to guarantee that you don’t show up for that phrase, you should include “free” as a negative keyword.

Similar to Google’s regular match types, you can include a negative keyword and select a match type of negative broad, negative exact or negative phrase.  With proper PPC Management extremely important to understand these match types so that you do not accidentally prevent your ads from showing on important keywords.

Negative Exact Match
When you select negative exact match, your ad will not show if the search term matches this keyword phrase exactly.  Nothing before, after or in the middle.

This match type is particularly useful if a subset of your important keyword phrase would not be appropriate.

With the video game example, we may decide to include the keyword phrase video game in our campaign, but we might add “video” as a negative exact match so that we do not show up for any searches on just the word “video”.

Negative Phrase Match
When you select negative phrase match, your ad will not show if the search term contains the keyword phrase in the proper order.

For example, if you have a negative phrase match keyword of “video camera” and a user enters the search term of “buy a video camera”, your ad will not show.  However, if they enter “camera with video”, your ad could show.

Negative Broad Match
When you select negative broad match, your ad will not show if the search term matches or contains the keyword phrase in any order and if the search term is a synonym or considered relevant to the phrase.

This, of course, is very vague and negative broad match should be use very, very carefully.

When we use broad match on a keyword phrase, we run the risk of showing our ad on a search term that is not really relevant, despite what the Google algorithm thinks.  But we are able to see the actual results in the search query report and make adjustments to the account.

However, when we use negative broad match, we run the much higher risk of our ad NOT showing for a search term that really would have been relevant.

And I never want my clients to be “missing” when their potential customers are looking for them!

Learn how to use these match types properly to make sure your ads are showing at the right time and not showing when they would be irrelevant.