Mike Mancini here again with PPCVideoTraining.com.
Today is video number four in our Google Ads Negative Keywords series.
This one is titled, "How much can negative keywords cost you in your Google Ads campaign?"
What we're going to do is we're going into a live campaign and show you exactly what
has happened when we're brought in to look at this campaign.
We actually showed this client just how much money they were wasting in their campaign
each and every month.
To be honest with you, the numbers are quite astounding.
One thing I want to make sure is this is not to embarrass anyone or put them down.
To be honest, they were getting some success out of their campaigns, but they just didn't
know or didn't understand just how powerful adding negative keywords to a campaign can
be.
All right.
Let's get started.
All right, so what we did here was we downloaded a spreadsheet directly from Google AdWords.
Now, this was for a new client that brought us in.
They wanted us to review and consult on some changes that we could make to their account.
Let me start off by saying this is not to make anybody feel bad.
What this is designed to do is show you that you should be taking negative keywords very,
very seriously, and it's the number one, number one way that people waste money in Google
Ads.
This was one of those clients, and maybe you're saying this to yourself now, "Google Ads don't
work," or maybe you've heard people say that quite a bit.
What happens is when we hear people say that, this is one of the first places that we start.
This and in the setting.
Because this is where people make a lot of mistakes.
Now, I'm not going to show you what the exact search terms were, but I am going to show
you the different categories of the bad searches that they really were.
As you can see, everything here in orange was somebody looking for their competition.
Now, you might say, "Well, that'd be great.
I'd love to have our ads come up when someone's looking for our competitors."
In some industries, that's fine.
But what we're running into now is people are just accidentally or just typing in they're
looking for a company name and clicking on the first search that comes up, whether it's
right or wrong.
Now, another thing I want to point out is look at the average cost per click in this
industry.
It's for a very expensive industry.
14, $23, $23, 21.59.
You don't want to be wasting a lot of money on clicks.
You can just see how fast it adds up.
But as I can also show you, not one of these terms ended up in a conversion.
Let's start with competitors.
All of the ones in orange was a search where somebody was looking for one of this company's
competitors.
They were not looking for them.
In this instance, since you can see, there was two clicks at fourteen-and-a-half dollars
a click, which cost this company 30 bucks.
All in all, $366.71 where someone was looking for this competition for this company.
This is in one month.
Now, in the yellow, when we talk about wrong locations, this is a company based in Minnesota.
What happens is people were in this location, they were in Minnesota, but they might have
been here for business, they might have been here on vacation, and they were looking for
this type of company, but in other states.
For instance, this one, they were looking for this type of company in Maryland.
This one, in a different city outside of where they were located.
This one, Arkansas.
This one, California.
All in all, $76.06 were spent in the wrong locations.
Now, all the blue ones are search terms but they could have been cleaned out by adding
the right negative keywords to a campaign.
Now, you're not going to get all of the negative keywords right away.
I mean, you're always going to find wasted ad spend.
These were a couple of those that probably we would have found that ad spend and then
added those to the negative keywords.
Maybe these could not have been avoided immediately, but just showing you, the wrong search terms
added up being $177.60.
Now, that sounds like a lot, and it is.
It's also a very expensive niche to advertise in.
By adding these terms to negative keywords for this campaign, this will never happen
again.
But sometimes those are going to happen.
There's nothing you can do with it.
Now, the green ones were someone was looking for another company, just like they were up
here, but they were looking for complaints about that company or reviews about that company.
Once again, these keywords came up.
It ended up costing $51.62.
You want to make sure that you're always adding in complaints or reviews, unless it's actually
your company they're looking for reviews on, if you want your ads to show up there.
But you want to make sure that you're avoiding these mistakes.
This is why we're doing this video.
Now, the correct search terms are the ones here in white.
These are the ones where people did a search and our ad showed up just like they should.
They were legitimate searches and they were bringing traffic in.
Those ended up costing $193.90.
The total ad spend for this budget for the month, $865.89.
As you could see here, 42% of the wasted ad spend went to competitors, almost 9% to wrong
locations, 20% to wrong search terms, and 6% to complaints or reviews.
Only 22%, or $193, of this total was actually legitimate ad spend.
We just want to beat it into everybody that's looking at doing Google AdWords or helping
run campaigns or whatever it might be, this cannot go overlooked.
Now, if you're running your own campaigns, this is going to be scary probably for you
to look at.
I just want you to know, look at this campaign right here.
You are not alone.
But this is something that you can avoid going forward.
Don't think about how much money you've wasted.
Think about how much money you're going to save moving forward.
All right?
Hope that helps.
Thanks so much for watching our video series on negative keywords.
If you enjoyed it, please like or subscribe to our channel, share it with someone else
who might find it interesting.
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We'd love to help.
Thanks for watching.