Negative Keyword Lists

Negative keywords are so critical to your campaigns, and it’s a topic that is pretty overlooked in my opinion – especially by newer affiliates. What is a negative keyword? A negative keyword tells a search engine NOT to display your ad if a person searches for a string with your negative keyword in it. For example, if you have an ad group with the only keyword being “ringtones” and you broad match it, your ad will show up for “Nelly ringtones, mobile ringtones, buy ringtones, free ringtones, etc.” Now say you don’t want your ad showing up when someone searches for “free ringtones”. Go into your ad group and type in “-free”. This will add “free” as a negative term, and your ad will never be displayed when someone types “free” in along with their keyword. Is this all that adding negative keywords can do? Nope, you can take this to an even larger and more important keyword.

Let’s talk basic buying philosophy for a second. When you’re advertising online, do you want to advertise to somebody who’s looking to buy something, or somebody who’s ready to buy? The obvious answer is you want somebody who is ready to buy. There are browsers, and there are buyers; we want the buyers as they are much more likely to convert and fill out the entire offer. Negative keyword lists can help us tremendously in this aspect. Let’s look at an example. Say you’re running the DentalPlans.com offer, and you put in the broad match term “Dental Plans” in your ad group. This could be a good term, your ad will show up for keywords like :

  • affordable dental plans
  • fast dental plans
  • cheap dental plans
  • buy dental plans
  • family dental plans

These all may be great keywords, it looks like they’re all people looking to purchase a dental plan. Aside from that, your ad will also show up for the following keywords :

  • information on dental plans
  • about dental plans
  • research dental plans
  • browse dental plans
  • dental plan help

In these keywords, it looks like the user is much more of a browser. They’re not ready to buy, they want to surf the net and research what’s out there. That’s great for them, but they’re going to click on you’re ad to research dental plans and you’re going to be the one paying for it. We want to show up for all the good keywords, but not the bad ones; here’s where we make a negative keyword list :

  • information
  • about
  • research
  • browse
  • help

Adding all those as negatives will eliminate your ad showing up when somebody searches for them. Never though negative keywords could be so helpful, did ya?

Where did I find this little gem? Right Here!

UberCamp tutorials were written by Uberaffiliate (no not me) Paul, and one other undercover super affiliate who may or may not have his own affiliate network.  But seriously, this is good for seasoned affiliates to just brush up on the basics or someone wanting to get into am, this is a must read.  It will guide you from the basic information about “What is affiliate marketing” to actually showing you how to build your own campaign and do it the right way.