I spent a good portion of my morning cleaning house in an Adwords campaign that I’ve recently begun to manage. Besides being terribly disorganized (a pet peeve of mine), the campaign was missing something essential: Negative Keywords. There are a lot of internet marketing novices out there today that manage Adwords campaigns and never take advantage of this crucial tool.

Let’s imagine you’re a business owner that sells pencils. Sadly for you, the majority of people that type the word “pencils” into a Google search are not looking to purchase. Many will be typing things like: “how to draw with pencils,” “test taking pencils,” “how to stop chewing on pencils,” etc. Obviously, you don’t want your ads showing up on those searches because they will not result in desired conversions.

To solve this problem, you must incorporate negative keywords into your campaign. So in this example, you might add negative keywords in the following manner (one per line, preceded with a dash):

-how to

-draw

-test

-chewing

This will ensure that you get a lower cost per conversion because you are weeding out potential “clickers” that aren’t really interested in purchasing your product.

Low cost/click=happy camper. Go rock those campaigns.