(Source) If you haven’t tested using negative keywords for your campaigns, I highly recommend doing so in the near future. It is an excellent strategy for improving the performance of your campaigns and minimizing unqualified click-throughs to your landing pages.
Google slipped one through on me. They changed the way you perform negative keyword selections in Google AdWords. It happens. But I’d like to say that this author is absolutely correct. Negative keywords can improve your click through percentage and your profits and it’s relatively easy to implement.
The main reason you want to use negative keywords in your pay per click campaigns is to prevent your ads from showing for searches that are unrelated to your product or service. For instance, let’s say that you sell dancing shoes. If you use the broad search terms “dancing shoes” without bracket or quotations (and I wouldn’t recommend doing that for that search term) then your ads will show up for any search related to dancing or shoes. So if someone types “brake shoes” into the Google search box because they are looking for prices on auto parts then your ad could draw clicks from unqualified customers and you’ll money. Unwanted clicks can really eat into your budget.
Similarly, if someone is looking for dancing schools then you’ll have your ads appear on the wrong pages for totally unrelated terms. So negative keywords can save you a bundle.
You enter your negative keywords the same way you do your positive keywords – one line at a time. But you select them based on your product or service and your target customer. Any potential keyword search that can be performed that is similar to the keywords used in your ads but that won’t deliver you targeted, qualified clicks should be a negative keyword. If you employ the negative keyword strategy you can bet that you will see an increase your ROI almost instantly.
