- Wanna learn how to reduce costs and increase sales
in your Google Shopping campaigns with negative keywords?
I'm gonna show you how to do that in this video, let's go.
(upbeat music)
Hey, guys, in this video,
I'm gonna show you how to use negative keywords
in your shopping campaigns to reduce your costs,
increase your sales and just have better results overall.
If you're new here, my name is Sam,
I help e-commerce store owners grow their stores remotely.
I make tutorials, case study videos, shredding videos,
and overall just teach you how to grow your store
all here on YouTube.
If this sounds helpful to you, consider subscribing
and grow your e-commerce store alongside me in this channel.
Okay, so what are negative keywords?
Basically, this is your way of telling Google
what searches you don't wanna show for.
For example, if you sell red shoes,
you don't wanna show your ads
if someone searches for red slippers.
These are different products,
and you wanna make sure Google doesn't mix them up.
So you can put slippers as a negative keyword.
This is a simple situation
but gives you an idea of what negative keywords are.
Okay, so how do you add them?
It's pretty easy, actually.
Go into Google ads, go to your campaigns,
go to keywords and go to negative keywords.
Here, there's a box
where you can add in the negative keywords
and they'll go into your campaign once you save it.
There it is, that's done, easy as pie.
Okay, why are negative keywords important
for a shopping campaign in particular?
Well, the main reason is you can't choose normal keywords
for a shopping campaign.
Shopping campaigns don't work like that.
You use your product feed and Google figures out
what the heck your products are.
With a normal search campaign,
you choose the keywords and bid on those.
And Google will then show your ads for search queries
depending on what your keywords are.
So what can you do with shopping campaigns?
You will choose all the elements of your product feed,
the title, description, images, all that sort of stuff.
And then Google will figure out what your products are
and show them to the right people.
The problem here is that Google sometimes gets it wrong.
So it's really important for you
to choose negative keywords well,
so you can guide Google and scope that traffic
to save you a lot of money in the long term.
You don't wanna show for searches that aren't profitable.
Red slippers and red shoes are quite different.
So you wanna tell Google,
hey, I don't wanna show for those red slippers,
but I do wanna show for those red shoes
and even more targeted terms like red shoes for men,
maybe that's a really good term for you.
So you don't wanna show for red shoes for women.
So you might put women as a phrase match keyword
in your negative keyword list.
If you don't do this,
you might have a lot of people seeing your shopping ads
and they might even click your products
but they won't actually convert
because your product isn't meant for them.
This is all part of digital marketing,
showing the right products, the right offer
in front of the right people at the right time.
We're gonna use some strategies
to find negative keywords and add them into our campaigns.
This is gonna help optimize them for the long run
and make sure that money stacks up in our favor.
So how do you find negative keywords
to add to your shopping campaign to reduce those costs?
The first way is to add keywords that show
that there might not be buying intent for that person.
Someone searching for how to do something,
how to wear red shoes.
They probably have red shoes already
or maybe they're just researching
and trying to understand red shoes.
For shopping campaigns, they work really well
when people are directly searching
to buy that product that you're selling.
That's why there are a number of keywords
like how, where, what, where people are
in that research phase of the buyer's journey.
They're not in that buying phase.
They're sitting there looking at all the search results
and trying to understand,
they're sitting there with a coffee mug in their hand.
The people that are ready to buy are sitting there
with their credit card in hand, and they reveal themselves
by using searches like buy red shoes online.
It has clear search buying intent where they're searching
how do I buy these red shoes?
How do I get them into my hands?
Those are the searches you want.
So with negative keywords, you can filter out
the other searches that don't show buying intent.
Now, sometimes you'll see in your search terms report
that people will convert on these terms.
That's why sometimes it's really important to test them out.
You might see a search term popping up again and again
and no one converts
and you're spending $200 on that search term.
Definitely add that as a negative,
but sometimes maybe in your niche,
maybe with your product, those people do convert.
Maybe it's a product that people don't know
what the heck it is.
But part of that, you convince them to buy straight away.
It really depends.
So a lot of this is testing,
but what I'd like to do, depending on the product
is to add those in
just to make sure that we save those costs at the start
especially if we have a low budget allocation
for the shopping campaign.
I mentioned this already,
but check your search terms report.
I'm gonna go into my computer right now
and show you how I do this, let's go.
Okay guys, so I'm now on the campaign level
looking at some campaigns and on the left-hand side
I wanna go into keywords and then search terms.
Here we can see what people have actually used
when they searched and our ads were clicked.
Okay, so we can see here
that we wanna go through and basically find
are there any search terms here that are not relevant
towards what we're showing?
This is a shopping campaign, but it's very very similar
with a search campaign as well.
So what I like to do is add a filter.
So I'm gonna go to conversions and say
if we haven't had any conversions to say put this as 0.1.
It's then gonna show all the ads, all the search queries
that resulted in less than 0.1 of a conversion
'cause I have position based conversion tracking
set up for the attribution model.
It's gonna show some that had a tiny, someone clicked
and then they clicked multiple ads before they converted,
that's totally fine.
So what we can do is sort by say cost.
Once it loads, we're gonna see the different queries
that were searched and ones that weren't actually relevant.
So maybe this one here
Whoa, no, that's gone.
Okay, I'll find another one.
So these ones actually don't look too bad.
Let me go by impressions
because if the click through rate sucks.
Okay, global shop direct.
Yeah, that's not related to this at all.
Direct is a bit related to the brand, but yeah,
that's probably some other e-commerce general store
or something like that.
So that's a really good example
of one that we would add as even like a phrase match.
Like these ones here, we've actually already added those in
because they were in great terms.
Kogan mobile, that's a competitor,
but they're a little bit distant as well as a competitor.
And so we'd go through and find the ones here
that we can see, oh clearly that's not for our product
or they haven't converted.
Maybe we've spent a lot of money and this takes enough.
You're gonna need enough data to get
to see what hasn't converted and how much it's cost
by basically going, okay, we don't wanna show
for that search term as then
what I would like to do is I like to copy all these
and put them into a spreadsheet basically
or some sort of list.
And then I go into negative keywords
and then I'll actually add them in with the match types
that I'll choose for those different ones.
So yeah, that's how you add it in
by looking at the search terms report, hope that helps.
The next way to find negative keywords is to use software.
What I like to use, what my team uses for many of our stores
and client accounts is to use software called Karooya.
What this software does
is it crawls your search terms report over time,
and it finds all the search queries that people search with
that don't lead to a conversion.
This is amazing because they don't just look
at the whole query, like how to buy red shoes,
but they look at words that are repeated
in every single query.
No one's gonna search for just how,
but they might use how in many different ways.
Karooya is gonna use their algorithms
to look at all the words and see patterns.
Maybe every time someone uses the word how in the query,
no one converts.
So that's a good example of a keyword that we wanna add
to our negative search terms report.
I'm gonna leave a link in the description to Karooya.
I don't get any commission or anything.
I just use it 'cause it's a fantastic piece of software.
I recommend checking it out
and seeing if it could work for your store.
There is also a Google ad script
that does a very similar thing, but that requires a bit more
of an advanced knowledge of Google ads
because you need to do some scripting work
with code and that sort of thing.
It's a bit more advanced, but if you wanna explore that
I'll put the link in the description
and you can go down that path and check it out.
Okay, a question I get quite often
is how often do you check for negative keywords?
Well, I like to put it in my routine,
so I check on a regular basis,
but it does depend on the size of the account
and how much data and clicks you're getting.
Because if you're barely getting any clicks at all,
say 10 clicks per day,
going to the search terms report is another exercise
that takes time when you might only see one or two
extra different search phrases in there.
When you can just wait for a week, two weeks, a month,
depending on the size of the account,
and then put them all in, in one batch.
This is what I recommend doing.
I like to check it at least once a month,
if not, once every fortnight or once a week
for big accounts that are spending a lot more money
say $1,000 per day.
You wanna check that every day,
but even better use some software so you can batch that.
So you're not doing it all manually
and going through every single search and support.
That just takes too time
and you should be spending your time in other areas.
The cool thing is once you add that negative keyword
into the negative keyword list, it's done, boom.
You've added it in, you won't need to do that again
because now those searches will be blocked.
So you will see that over time, slowly,
your campaigns are gonna improve and improve and improve.
It's gonna be more and more optimized
and you've been slowly crafting that traffic
so it's better and better every single week.
This means that there's gonna be less work
to be done over time.
And you're gonna get to a point where really
you don't only have to check the account once a month
for negative keywords.
So that's just the benefit.
Keep your eyes on the prize,
there's light at the end of the tunnel.
And even though there's a lot of terms to add at the start,
depending on the account,
it's gonna get easier and easier
and you're doing a great job by doing this.
That's all for today.
I hope that helps you
with your negative keywords for your shopping campaigns.
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As always, any questions you might have at all,
just leave it in the description
and I'll answer every single one as quick as I can.
Thanks so much for watching
and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye for now.
(upbeat music)