So you just created your first Google Ads account and you are advertising for your small business that sells credit card processors. You had an amazing mentor and even hired a consultant on how to structure your account for optimal performance. You are advertising on thousands of keywords revolving around credit card processors. These keywords are broken out by both device and match type: Exact, Broad, Phrase, and Broad Match Modifier. Now when someone searches something in google remotely close to your keywords, you are popping up. Great, your keywords are doing their job and your ad is showing up. You are now leading potential customers to your website that will hopefully fill out a form fill or call your business. The idea is that these viewers who are clicking your ads are in actual need of your product, which in this case is a credit card processor. But, is that always the case? Let’s take a look at what really happens…
When you advertise on any broad match type you are opening up the floodgates for high funnel traffic. Sometimes, these searches are not even on the funnel! Broad match types can bring in very irrelevant queries sometimes and it is your duty to monitor this. In our example above, you may have the keyword “accept credit cards” in a broad match type. Below, you will see the search terms this keyword popped up for:
As you can see above, your keyword trigger tons of searches for people looking to see where credit cards are accepted. For instance, “does woodmans accept credit cards”. This individual is looking to see if Woodman’s accepts credit cards. They do not want to purchase a credit card processor. Therefore, you need to isolate this irrelevant searches and make them negative. You should make them exact match negative so that exact search will never trigger your ad again. You should also determine if you can pick out an individual word from the search that can be made into a broad match negative. Therefore, you will never show up again for any searches that contain this one word. For instance, we made, “woodmans” broad match negative because there are no relevant searches for our business that would include that word. By reinforcing an exact match negative with a broad match negative you are ensuring you will not waste money again on similar irrelevant searches.
In the beginning weeks/months of launching broad match campaigns you should be taking a look at non-converting search terms on a daily basis to find your “negative keywords”. In case you do not know how to pull these search terms you are going to go to the keyword tab and then click search terms and download the report for the selected date range. You are going to want to filter by 0 conversions and take a look at all non-converting search terms. From these search terms you will isolate what queries will be deemed negative. You will take these “negative keywords” and upload them to your “Shared Library” and apply them to the applicable campaigns.
As you continue to undergo this process of finding and uploading negative keywords to the account you will see both your costs and cost per lead decrease. In addition to that, you will the quality of leads that are coming in improve. Overall, you will have a healthier account with endless possibilities to grow!
