In this video, you're going to learn how to use
negative keywords to optimize your Google Shopping campaigns.
Negative keywords are the keywords you add to your Google Shopping campaign,
to tell Google what searches you don't want to show for.
For example, you don't want to show for searches such as "Free",
"Discount", or "How to", as these people will be less likely to buy from you.
So we go into our campaigns, and add these as negative keywords,
so when someone searches we won't show our ads for these queries.
We're going to cover these topics in this video.
Why add negative keywords, how to add them in your account,
how to find the right negative keywords to add for your store.
Let's first talk about - why add negative keywords.
When we create our Google Shopping campaign,
we don't set keywords to show for, like we do with a regular search campaign.
The way Google knows who to show our products to is by looking at our product feed,
and then showing them to some people, and watching how people interact with those ads.
Google will then try to optimize and show for more and more people, looking for our products.
Now negative keywords allow us to guide the algorithm and help this process.
Instead of Google showing our products to all these random people,
we can give the algorithm a hand by providing negative keywords.
We can tell Google to not show for certain searches,
that would obviously be terrible, and not convert.
For example, we don't want to show for people searching for Costco.
This is because people searching for Costco are
more likely to just be searching for that product at their local Costco.
Now, this isn't to say that we can't get conversions from these sort of search queries,
but when we start our shopping campaigns we want to focus on what's going to be profitable.
Yes, some searches that we don't want could get us sales,
but the cost is going to be so high that it's just not profitable.
At the start of our campaigns we want to focus on getting as many
conversions as possible for our limited budget.
So by adding negative keywords, we can help the algorithm get more profitable searches
for more relevant traffic, which is going to be better for our campaign.
Now, how do we actually add these negative keywords into our account?
It's really easy, let's do it right now.
Just open up your Google Ads account, go to shopping campaigns on the left.
Make sure you click "Campaign" here, click your shopping campaign and go to "Keywords",
and then "Negative keywords" on this menu, on the left.
You'll then see the negative keywords report.
We can then click this ➕ to see this box, where we can add our negative keywords one-by-one.
You can also use a list by clicking this button here.
We'll talk about that later in this video, when we talk about batch adding negative keywords.
You can also add them on the campaign level, or the ad group level.
It's then in this box here, where we add our negative keywords.
Once you've added your negative keywords, just click "Save".
I also need to talk about match types.
Match types are basically the different ways that you can tell Google
how the negative keyword affects the search queries.
There are 3 types of negative match types:
1. Broad
2. Phrase
3. Exact
Broad is when you just add the negative keyword as it is, without any symbols.
For example: "red shoes".
If you add "red shoes" as a negative broad match keyword,
any search query with both red and shoes in that query won't trigger your ad.
So if someone searches for where to buy shoes that are red online, your ad will not show.
To tell Google to add a negative broad match keyword,
just leave it as is, in the box, just like this.
Let's now compare this to phrase match negative keywords.
With a phrase match negative keyword, it will only stop your ads from triggering
if red shoes is an intact phrase in the search query.
So your ad could still show for:
"Where to buy shoes that are red online",
but it won't show for:
"Where to buy red shoes online".
To tell Google to make your negative keyword a phrase match negative keyword,
just add quotes to either side of the phrase.
Lastly, we have exact match, which is much more straightforward.
An exact match negative keyword will only stop the ad from triggering
when the search query is exactly what the negative keyword is.
For example, if someone only searches for "red shoes", then our ad won't be triggered.
With the prior 2 examples our exact match negative keyword of red shoes,
would still lead to our ad being triggered.
To tell Google to use an exact match negative
keyword just enclose it in square brackets, like this.
We recommend using a mix of these different match types,
depending on the search query you're trying to stop.
For example, let's say we're adding a negative
keyword to our product group that only has "white shoes".
So we want to stop searches for other colors triggering our ad.
We would add phrase match negative keywords for all the different colors like red,
black, blue, etc.
Now, let's talk about how we know which negative keywords to add to our shopping campaign.
There are 3 main methods that we use.
1. Using a master existing negative keyword list, that every new shopping campaign should have.
2. Regularly checking our search terms report on at least a weekly basis.
3. Using some software that consistently analyzes our search terms report
and finds the words that consistently lead to a lower chance of conversion.
Let's look at one first.
For most new campaigns we'll add a pre-existing list of negative keywords.
This is a list of keywords that we know have a very low chance at leading to a conversion.
The list looks like this, and has a bunch of terms like free, promo, and stuff like that.
We'll add a link to our own negative keyword list, I'll leave a link to that down below.
Just access it, and copy the whole list like this.
Now go back to your Google Ads account and at the top go to "Tools and settings",
and under shared library go to "Negative keyword lists".
Click the➕ to create a new list.
Add the list name: Master negative keywords Google Shopping.
Then paste the list in the box below,
click "Save" and it's going to create the list of negative keywords.
Now we need to apply this to our Google Shopping campaign.
Go back to your Shopping campaign, and on the left go to "Keywords", "Negative keywords".
Then click the ➕ and click the radio box that says "Use negative keyword list".
Then select the list we just created, and click "Save".
The second strategy that we use to find negative keywords is called, "Negative keyword mining".
This is where we regularly open up our search terms report and look for irrelevant terms.
You can find the search terms report by going to your shopping campaign,
going to "Keywords" on the left and going to "Search terms".
We do this at least on a weekly basis.
You can do it more regularly if you have more traffic because you're getting more clicks,
and more search queries to go through and mine.
For big accounts, we'll do this daily.
The way it works, is that you go through the search terms report
bit-by-bit, and look for search queries that have a lower chance of converting.
We then add these as negative keywords.
It's a skill and it takes a bit of time to get,
especially at the start when you don't have a lot of conversion data.
You really want to imagine what's going through the mind of the searcher as they
search for this query, and would they actually click and convert on your ads.
For example, someone searching for: "Good gift ideas for mom",
likely don't know what they actually want to buy and are just looking for ideas.
Yes, they could buy from our store, but the probability is going to be
much lower as we don't know if their mum is actually one of our target customers.
Plus, maybe our product isn't even targeted towards mums so this search query is going to
be absolutely terrible, and we definitely want to add it as a negative keyword.
You can see that you need to use your own judgment here for your store, and your products.
The other thing you can do is set your columns
in your search terms report to sort descending, by total cost.
This is where we can see the search queries where
we've spent a lot of money on, but we haven't got a profitable ROAS.
So, I like to look at the conversion value over cost column, the ROAS column,
and compare the metrics here to my breakeven ROAS.
Of course we need to use tact here.
Don't go blasting all these search queries as negative
keywords because there is a chance that we could improve your campaigns,
by improving the conversion rate, adding bidding adjustments, and bidding on the product level.
Ideally we want to look out for search queries with a lot of spend,
say 5-10X our average order value, with a very low ROAS.
We then collect all these search queries and
add them as negative keywords on our product level, or product group level.
We want to add negative keywords at the
campaign level when they could be applied to all our products.
We add negative keywords at the product group
level when they could be applied to products in that product group.
For example, if we have different colors of our products separated into different product groups,
we might want to add negative keywords for each of the colors, for each of the opposing groups.
The last strategy that we use to find negative keywords is using software.
We've been using Karooya for years to mine negative keywords.
It's some software that crawls all your search terms reports and pulls
out all the recommended negative keywords for those campaigns.
Now, it doesn't just pull out whole negative keywords, it runs what's called an N-gram script.
This is a handy piece of code that goes through all your search queries,
and looks for specific words that lead to a lower probability of getting a conversion.
For example, maybe every single search query that has "Where",
somewhere in the search query, has a very low chance of converting.
Well, Karooya will find this, let you know so that you can add it as a negative.
The great thing is that at the time of this video, Karooya is actually
free if you're spending less than $10k per month on Google Ads.
I'll leave a link down below to go and sign up.
To use it, just log into Karooya and click "Create new reports".
It will take about 10-20 minutes to go through your entire account,
and build a report of all the negative keywords you should add.
You will receive an email once it's complete.
Then you'll refresh, and you'll see these tabs here, filled out with the data.
"Must add negatives" are negative keywords that are highly recommended to add to your account.
Keep in mind that I still don't add these must-haves in,
unless they have a significant amount of clicks or costs.
You don't want to add negative keywords in too early, because the next click
could be a conversion, which means that some of these keywords could actually be very profitable.
This is why it's all about being statistically significant with our data-driven decisions.
I'll go through each of these tabs, and pull out the negative keywords that have
a significant amount of clicks, and are clearly great keywords to add.
I'll then add them to my campaigns, and we're good to go.
There we have the 3 main methods we use for adding negative keywords,
to our Google Shopping campaigns.
I'll leave a link to all videos and resources that I mentioned down below.
If you're watching this on YouTube,
it's actually part of our free Google Shopping course on our website.
It's 100% free, with no signup required, and it shows you how to set up,
optimize, and scale your campaigns.
I'll leave a link to that course down below.
If this video was useful please give it a like, and let me know in the comments below.
Otherwise, thanks for watching guys, and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye for now.