Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
PPC: how to get rid of an ad appearing on a keyword we don't want?
-
Hi,
Our ad on Google Ads is appearing for a search we don't want. it isn't in our search keywords and when i try and ad it to our negative ones, we get the error " You cannot exclude keywords that are targeted " which i assume means that google thinks we are bidding on it?
We have a selection of broad phrase matches so i can only think that this is where it's coming from?
Do you have any tips on tracking down which keyword is generating this ad and how we can turn it off?
(we don't want to pay for clicks on this search if possible!)
Btw - i have turned off each keyword in turn to test it = nothing. have then paused the whole campaign = gets rid of the ad (but this is our most successful campaign so i can't just turn it off).
Any advice super super welcome. thank you!
-
Hi Fubra,
First thing that I can recommend that you do is to go into your AdWords account, then into the campaigns, then into the tab titled 'Keywords'. Once there, click into the tab titled 'Search Terms'.
Once in the 'Search Terms' tab, you should see all the keywords that triggered your ad to show. In this tab, look for the specific keyword that is unwanted. Select this keyword by clicking on the selection box on the left and you should see a bar pop up that allows you to select what you want to do with this keyword. Select the option 'Add as Negative Keyword' and that should stop the ad from triggering each time someone searches for the unwanted keywords.
Pro-tip: As part of your PPC optimization process, you should also be looking in the 'Search Terms' section of your campaigns/ad groups on a regular basis to see exactly what search terms are triggering your ads to show. There's bound to be search terms that are non-converters and also irrelevant search terms. By continually adding those to your list of negative keywords, you make your PPC campaigns more cost-effective.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved How should I update the grouping of keywords in a google ads account
hi, I have a google adwords account running for a while in a fairly competitive market in a major city so there is only one geo location with many suburbs or council areas as popular searched. I have keywords that are 2-4 words long and very similar. I have had one keyword in its own campaign, several in one campaign and a location campaign. The location campaign has several adgroups for specific suburbs. My question is that the most popular search terms are similar but in different campaigns and I am wondering if this is not the best way. for example I have these keywords in separate campaigns as exact match and phrase match
Paid Search Marketing | | salliWW
rubbish removal
rubbish removal near me
rubbish removal Washington But the way google uses exact match seems to be changing and I am concerned these would be best in one adgroup. Also these keywords trigger similar phrases, for example, waste removal. Is it best to put them in one campaign with one ad group or one campaign with separate adgroups, or leave as is. As competition has increased I need to bid for top of page now and need to keep budget rises as little as possible..0 -
Top of funnel google ads campaign not hardly converting, why?
Hi, I really hope someone can help me with this. I'm running two search ad campaigns and a google shopping campaign in google ads. The search campaigns are targeting top-of-funnel keywords as the business doesn't have universally known collections which everyone would search for so they are just unique to my business. So the campaigns are driving traffic but really converting whereas google shopping is converting because searchers are looking for particular products so they're lower down the funnel closer to aking a purchase decision. I feel I've optimised the campaign well and for the most part, most keywords have 7/10 quality score. The landing page seems fine. However, our offering wasn't as strong as competitors so we've offered a discount the same as them to compete. Since I started google ads we have nearly doubled our monthly revenue and the product types targeted in campaigns have increased in quantity sold so it seems it's having an effect but the campaigns aren't showing a good performance. Does anyone have any suggestions or input that could help me? I looked at first interaction attribution model and even there it's not performing well which makes this even more difficult to resolve. I'm thinking I should enable USER id feature in Google analytics so i can track signed in users across devices which may then help attribute sales to paid search channel as I saw in search console that the keyword that generates the most traffic to the site is our brand name and we're not a well-known brand so makes me think they may be starting their buyer's journey on a work computer on their mobile and finishing on their computer at home as an example. However, I don't believe this will be the main cause or solution as I would only have data for signed in users which still won't give me the full picture. Also if the campaign is optimised effectively but conversions are minimal could not having many conversions affect quality score? If someone can help or provide me with a different perspective it would be much appreciated. Please let me know if I need to clarify or explain further. I hope I've made myself clear. Thanks, T
Paid Search Marketing | | TZ19820 -
304 "If Modified Header" Triggers Error in Google Ads?
We have a client who is launch some Google Ads campaigns, and they recently asked us to fix 304 "Errors" on their website as per this feedback: "When we inspected the website we came across a number of 304 status errors. In order to get the ads running, we will need all of the website domain status codes converted to 200. “ Of course, all of their website pages return a 200 Status, it's just the HTTP headers that additionally clarify with a 304 Response (not an error). Has anyone else ever run into this issue with Google Ads? IMHO it makes no sense to remove this functionality. Google has even recommended in the past to use this it: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/11/date-with-googlebot-part-ii-http-status.html Thanks for any tips or feedback!
Paid Search Marketing | | mirabile0 -
Does having redirects in a Adwords text ad destination URL hurt quality scores?
I recently noticed that one of my clients had several redirects in their Adwords text ad destination URLs. I updated the destination URLS to land on the final location (thereby losing all the text ad history). However I'm wondering if this could have any impact on the text ad quality scores (none of them were disapproved).
Paid Search Marketing | | RosemaryB0 -
Using the same landing page for seo and ppc
When does it make sense to create one landing page for both seo and ppc?
Paid Search Marketing | | melen0 -
How long does it ramp up a PPC campaign?
I was speaking to a SEO the other day. He is going to be working on an ecommerce site soon. I was suggesting that he might want to augment his SEO efforts with PPC in order to be able to show some results in the near term, as it would most likely take some time for his SEO work to be showing results. His response was that while he hasn't utilized them as much, he's found that it can take 3-6 months to get a PPC campaign to really make money. I'm just curious if you guys feel that this is an accurate statement?
Paid Search Marketing | | brettgus0 -
What to do against competitor PPC sabotage?
This morning a competitor of ours decided to go on a PPC rampage against us. Basically our budgeting money was spent within the first hour of going live on bing. Its pretty obvious whats going on as we had a tremendous amount of clicks all from the exact same keyword within a short period of time. Obviously first step was to contact bing and they are going to refund me a credit once they go through their process, but they didnt really give me confidence about the future. It seems they may not be able to prevent this from continually happening.. ? The attacker used some sort of IP spoofing as the clicks were all from different IP's which is probably why it snuck pasted Bing. Wondering what have you guys done in the past to prevent this or combat it? Thankfully it didnt happen on google
Paid Search Marketing | | DemiGR0 -
Does anyone know of an excel template for creating keyword combinations?
I am looking for an Excel template with Macros that would allow me to drop a column of keywords next to a column of modifiers and it would build out thousands of keywords with a Macro. Can anyone drop their best SEO/SEM Excel template spreadsheet links in the comments?
Paid Search Marketing | | eli-hgm0
