Back To Blogs

The Necessity of Negative Keywords: Why Your Google Ads Account Cannot Survive Without Them

By: Abdi Morrison

Keywords are the heartbeat of any functioning Google ads account, and every account should have both positive and negative keywords. These match types are contrary in nature, but they also complement each other very well. The positive and negative keywords come together to form a Yin-Yang relationship with one another. Your advertising strategy will never be whole without having both dualities. You cannot have one of these match types without having the other. 

Even though the Yang is symbolically associated with the negative, there is nothing negative about negative keywords. This match type can be used to produce very positive results for your Google Ads account. You want to make friends with this important match type because they can be very good to you. 

Negative keywords are important because they prevent your ads from being displayed for queries that are unrelated to your products and services. The benefits that come with implementing a proper negative keyword strategy are numerous, and those benefits have a positive carry over effect on other aspects of your account. This will ultimately help you beat your competitors. Here are some of those benefits:

They increase your conversion rate

The people who visit your website or landing page will be those who are interested in your product or service. Negative keywords help you weed out irrelevant traffic, so you’ll be more likely to get conversions from people that want to visit your website. Not every conversion that you receive is guaranteed to convert into a sale. If you run a lead generation business, and you have ten conversion leads for a campaign, maybe only five of them will close. It’s good to have as many conversions as possible so you can increase the probability of closing sales. More conversions mean more sales. More sales means more money for your business.

They decrease your cost per conversion, and your costs in general

You won’t have to spend as much money in order to get the traffic you want to your business. Your business will be more profitable because you’ll generate a higher return on your ad spend. Are you making more money in revenue than you are spending on advertising? That’s usually the main question that matters if you’re an advertiser. With proper negative keyword use, it will help your ability to answer “yes” to this question.

They increase your click through rate (CTR)

Your CTR will increase because you will target people that have the intention of searching for and buying your product. Having a higher CTR will result in a higher Quality Score. Having a higher Quality Score will decrease the amount of money that you have to spend for a click.

Impact on A/B Split Testing

When you run A/B split tests on your ads, you want to know that the traffic coming to your website or landing page is relevant. You want to know that the people who come to your site are there because they are genuinely interested in your product or service. You don’t want to receive irrelevant traffic because your data will be inaccurate. You won’t be able to tell the whole story of how your ads are performing because the data that you have will include a lot of irrelevant traffic. Having a good negative keyword strategy will bring you more quality clicks to your website. You’ll be able to make a more informed decision on how your ads are performing, if the traffic that your ads receive is relevant traffic. That’s how negative keywords benefit A/B split tests.

Negative keywords are just as vital and just as important as positive keywords. A well-developed Google ads account should have a thorough list of negative keywords. Google Ads managers should make sure that they spend just as much time on negative keyword research as they do on positive keyword research. Maintaining a good negative keyword list requires a lot of attention, but if you’re willing to put in the work, the benefits will be worth the effort. 

Request A Free Audit