Heightened Importance of Negative Keywords

You can determine the quality of a paid search program by the depth and complexity of its negative keywords strategy. It has always been important to apply the right exclusions at the right levels but it is even more crucial now with search engines widening the scope of keywords with semantic matching.


User Journey Harvesting

It is a requirement to invest in multiple levels of the funnel. You will always want to maximize the bottom but eventually you will need to move up as the bottom dries up. Alongside this strategy, proper negative keywords that funnel queries to more specific areas in the account would ensure that you are serving users the right ads. For example, if you have keywords such as “red sneakers” and “sneakers”, you will want to exclude “red” from the latter.


Category Delineation

Any product or service can further be described by its specifications or utility. Extending the example above further, higher intent searches for “red sneaker” can be “light sole red sneakers” to describe additional specifications or “red sneakers for running” to describe its functionality. One of these would have a stronger intent as it relates to your brand and you may want to exclude one from the other.


It probably doesn’t hurt to let auction time bidding determine whether a user is matched to “light sole red sneakers” or “red sneakers for running”. This is an instance where you will want to lean on Google to make the right decision. However, if we dissect “light sole red sneakers” a bit more there may be some delineation within the category that makes sense.


Someone looking for “light sole sneakers” and “red sneakers” will have a preference as far as which specification in the product they value more. At the same time, brands will also have a preference for which they can support better. For instance, if your brand is known for the quality of its soles, then you will want to bid more aggressively on those queries to own the space. Ensuring that all “light sole” queries go to a campaign or ad group supporting that unique product offering would be important for your brand and needs to be managed by having the right exclusions.


Irrelevant High Intent Queries

No matter how versatile your product is or how many customers would benefit from your services, there will still be queries that will have no intent associated. Let’s continue with the example above and use an easy modifier. If your brand is in the business of selling new products, in this case new red sneakers, someone searching for “red sneakers sole repair” will likely not be relevant to you. There are quite a few of these and it will be hard to think of all of them in advance. However, if you are not diligent in weeding them out, you will spend a decent amount on them over time.


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Better Performance With Audience Intelligence

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Deprecation of Broad Match Modifier