Negative Keywords

[SEOSponge]

This will end up being a two part question:

We have been running a search marketing campaign for about 45 days.  It seems no matter how many negative keywords we add (over 300 right now), we still are receiving borderline relevant traffic to the broad match ad group.

We are in the printing industry and I think this in itself presents a challenge since there are thousands of competitors in our market, national & local.  People also search for a variety of items, most of which end up having nothing to do with our business (i.e. animal prints, zebra prints etc.)

We are running several different ad groups: one exact match, one broad and one phrase match.

• Does anyone have a resource or links they are willing to share that has general negative terms they use before creating any new campaign? I have ones I have found, but wondering if there is a very good master resource out there.

• How many key phrases do you typically add to an 'Exact Match' ad group?

Thank you!

[EvolveCreative]

Yah or just post here and I'd be happy to help. For some reason I don't get e-mails when someone PMs me.

[SEOSponge]

Thank you! Will definitely PM you if I start to get lost.

Jon

[DavidKonigsberg]

No problem - if you use modifiers and phrase and broad negatives it should solve your issues- If you need more info on modifiers pm me

[SEOSponge]

Everyone, thanks for the responses.

I appreciate the info on Broad Match Modifier. reading through it now. Thanks Dave, that's funny I have used the list ChicagoStyle has posted as a resource!

[DavidKonigsberg]

The answer is to not use broad match use broad match modifier and other match types or you will always run into these problems.

The other way to do it is use broad and phrase match negatives instead of exact match.

Without seeing the account this is the best i can do to help you

[EvolveCreative]

Hey SEOSponge,

I've used this list before:

http://www.chicagostyleseo.com/2012/02/open-source-negative-keyword-list/

When I don't have time to build my own negative keyword list. I prefer to make my own though. Have you gone through the "keyword details" report? Navigate to the "keywords" tab of each campaign and look for "keyword details." That's the report you want to look at - especially when you're using broad match.

Google recommends 30 keywords per ad group. I've used more or less. Not really that important.

For your broad match campaigns consider using modified broad match. Still broad, but MUCH more targeted and you won't get those really crazy results if you set it up right. Here's a resource,

http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/bmm.html
http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497702

Let me know if you have any other questions. I've been deep in AdWords the last few weeks.

Thanks,

Dave

[KeriMorgret]

I've collected several resources for negative keyword lists, as well as techniques for making your own, in this post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-keywords-for-positive-roi. I'm asking another associate who has more PPC experience than I to chime in with any additional experience.