Piano and Stuff: Google Adwords Negative Keyword Tips

Google Adwords is a scary concept: you are paying your dollars for every “click”. Costs/click for competitive keywords have suggested prices of over $20.00. Although you can set bid price low to moderate costs, expenditures get out of control quick if you defer leeway to Google in allowing synonyms for keywords. Google has a shockingly loose synonym practice for our industry’s keywords.

Google has shown my keywords about selling a house to queries that frankly have nothing to do with houses. These are exact queries I’ve seen historically: “how to sell your piano” and “sell your stuff app”. $5.00 to $20.00 / click adds up fast.

You need a strategy to “leash” Google from showing your ads on unrelated queries. “Negative keywords” is good one to block queries unlikely to convert to a lead. Google’s official definition is “A type of keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase. Your ads aren’t shown to anyone who is searching for that phrase.” You can set these up as Shared Library or even on individual keywords. I have over 2,500 negative keywords. Grows everyday.

Building an effective negative keyword library is easy. Adwords has a “Keywords” tab, in there is a “Search terms” option, and you can find a list of every query that triggered a clicked ad. You can go in daily or weekly to pick-up terms that are driving your budget up unnecessarily.

One concept to break away from when your designing negative keywords is just because a query “sounds like a hot lead” doesn’t mean you want it to show your ad going forward. Good example: a person seeking to “evict person from house” sounds like a motivated seller DMM lead right? Well, you still wouldn’t want a general “we buy houses ad” to pop up for that query. Landing page, advertisement, and keyword should be carefully tailored to each other. There’s a lot of reasons for this (beyond scope of this blog), but suffice it to say: if your ad and landing page isn’t answering the direct intent of the query, Google is not going to be happy as you are hurting their product.

I’ve been doing this a while, so here are some quick tips for our industry:

Geography Terms: Are you only in one market? Tricky thing with Google geography targeting is that the best option is people “searching in and about” the target area: the rub is people in your area may be searching about houses out of the area (and vice versa). You can add negative keywords for markets your not interested in.

Stuff & Piano: I’ve always been hesitant to make “house” a broad match modifier (i.e. allow closer variations but not synonyms) because I do like synonyms like condo, land, home, property, real estate. It would add a layer of complexity to create keywords branching out (but maybe that is a good idea?). Anyway, you can just go ahead and add stuff and piano to your negative list, and consider whether to use a modifier on “house”.

Realtor/Real Estate Agent: Want to target “sell house fast” – sounds good but even there you need to careful. It is not rare for people to search about needing a realtor or real estate agent along with “need to a sell a house” type term. I added negative search terms for agent, realtor, broker, brokerage, realty. Perhaps there could have been some value there, but dollar for dollar, if people are searching for realtors my landing page isn’t really a great experience for them. It’s possible I could lose some “sell my house without a realtor” type searches. I’m going go after that organically.

Hope these are some good tips to get some optimizations on your Google Adwords account!

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