Today, we're talking about negative keywords in Google Ads. We're going to show you what
they are. We're going to show you how to find them and show you some examples, and also
going to go into what types of negative keywords you can add on your own to your campaign to
save you a huge, huge portion of your advertising budget. Let's get to it.
Hi, I'm Mike Mancini. I'm a Google Ads agency owner for the last nine years. Now, talking
about negative keywords, make sure you stay till the end. And I'm going to show you how
you can get our list of over 2,300 negative keywords that you can literally copy and paste
into your campaign right now. What are negative keywords? Negative keywords are those types
of keywords that people will type into a search, where you do not want your ads to show up.
Now, there are four main ways to find potential negative keywords. I'm going to talk about
all four, but I'm also going to show you some examples.
Number one is really just experience, knowing what you don't want. And being in this industry
for as long as I have, we understand, before we even set up a campaign, we know what types
of keywords we do not want our ads to show up for, things like cheap and affordable.
Those are people who are doing price shopping. Other things are like DIY, or do it yourself,
or how to, because people are looking to do it themselves and not hire a company to do
it for them. Another thing might be research. People might be doing a search on your industry
for research. Maybe it's a college term paper. Maybe they're just checking out some statistics,
whatever it might be. You want to make sure that your ads for your services aren't showing
up for something like that. The number two way to find negative keywords
is competitors. You want to make sure that your ads are not showing up when somebody
is doing a search for one of your competitors. Five, six, seven years ago, we were actually
allowing this to happen, where somebody would do a search for ABC company, and your company
maybe is called XYZ, that ad would show up. People would click on it, and they might be
calling for a service, and you answering the phone might be able to convince that potential
person, "No, we're not ABC company, but we also do pest control," or whatever it might
be. You can sell your services and possibly turn that into a new client.
However, as time has gone on over the last few years, we have stopped this completely.
And the reason is, our clients were saying that they were getting a lot of calls for
people who were calling ABC company to complain, or to change their appointment schedule, or
to get some information about their service, when their tech is going to be there, maybe
their tech hasn't shown up, whatever it might be. And even though they could potentially
turn one of those clients into one of their own, the ratio was far too little for as many
calls as they were taking and as much money as they were spending on those clicks. You
want to make sure that you're blocking your competitors, and I'll show you how to do that
here in just a second. Number three would be search terms. Inside
your Google Ads campaign, you can see the keywords that people have typed in and clicked
on your ads. And you can go in there and be like, "Oh, we don't want somebody who types
in that to have our ad come up and have them click it and charge us money," so on and so
forth. We'll show you how to find those. And number four, prebuilt negative keyword
list, and I'm going to show you one of those right here at the end. Let me show you some
examples of what we're talking about. Experience, maybe you have some, maybe you don't, but
if you do not have any experience, this obviously is not going to apply to you, so we're going
to skip ahead right to number two, competitors. The best way that I've found to add competitors
is obviously your experience. Who are the big companies in your area where you don't
want your ads to show? Another great place to look is actually on
Google itself, inside of the Google business listings. Go to Google, let's type in something
like plumbers, scroll down to the map section, which is your Google business listing and
click on the map. And on the left-hand side, you can see all of the other local plumbers
in that area. For example, if you are ABC company, you don't want your ad showing up
for Dean's Home Services. Open up a Notepad and type in Dean, and also type in Dean's,
plural version. Roto-Rooter, maybe you don't want your ad coming up for that. I might just
type in Roto, I might type in Rooter. Any version of that keyword will get blocked.
P & S, you might type P & S, and then do it without the spaces, because that shows up
as one keyword, P&S. You can scroll down and find a bunch of competition.
But what we will typically do before we start a new campaign is we'll go scroll down, and
we'll go through. You can see there's a bunch of pages. You're going to come up into some
duplicates. They're going to show the same companies, start showing them more and more.
What we might do is we might go down here and go through about three pages of competitors.
Take those names, put them on a Notepad, and I'll show you how to add those into your negative
keywords here in just a second. But that is the easiest way to get as many competitors
in your local area to add to your negative keyword list.
The third way that we talked about are search terms. We can go into the campaign and see
what people have already searched. You can go down and go into the Campaign, go to Keywords,
and go to Search terms. Here, you can see a number of things that people have typed
in and clicked on your ads. Right here, this is for a fencing company, a 100-foot roll
chain link fence. You might not sell the rolls. This is a fencing company. We don't want...
If somebody is looking for a 100-foot roll of fence, we don't want our ads to show up.
In our list that we already started doing with competitors, we might type in roll. Eight-foot
chain link fence, once again, that might be something where we're not going to... We don't
want somebody to call our services just to do eight feet. We're used to doing hundreds
and thousands of feet. That's a very small job.
Black chain link fence. If you don't have a black chain link fence, you might want to
add that keyword. Chain link commercial fence. If you only do residential, you want to make
sure you add commercial, and go down and make sure you have your date changed here to All
time if you've never done this before, but go down and you will find a number of keywords
that you can already add to your campaign. Now, if you did this a month ago, only change
the dates and go back one month, because obviously, before that, you've already added those negative
keywords. And the fourth way we talked about finding
negative keywords is to use a negative keyword list. Over the last nine years, I've compiled
the list of more than 2,300 negative keywords that we have added to campaigns. And we actually
add these keywords to our campaigns before we ever turn them on. It will save you thousands
of dollars and a ton of time in going through and finding these different searches. These
are actual searches that people have made, and we want to make sure that our ads aren't
getting clicked for it. You can see that there are 90 keywords in the adult and swearing
section. I know that may sound a little bit juvenile, but you'd be shocked at how many
times people will swear when they type in a search. This will make sure that your ads
are not going to be showing for that. Next might be business-to-business. You can
see the agencies, if you're a plumber and you don't want somebody typing in looking
for a plumber association. We want to make sure we block those. Books. If somebody is
looking for a plumber, you want to make sure that they're not looking for plumbing books.
Careers, case studies, classes, clubs, maybe a plumbing college, conferences, this blocks
all of those. We have things like cheap and price, or plumbing closeout. If they're looking
for supplies, you don't want your ads showing. We also have DIY, education, employment, geography,
kids, industry, legal, manufacturing. You get the idea.
What you do with these keywords is you literally copy them, the ones that you want, go back
to your Notepad, paste those, and I'm going to show you how to add those to your negative
keyword list right now. Select all of them, and copy them, go to your campaign, and go
to Negative Keywords, click the plus button, and you can paste them right here, and then
click on Save. And that's how you add negative keywords to your campaign.
Now, this is an extremely important thing to do for every single Google Ads campaign.
We have gone into campaigns, taking them over, and gone in and realized that 75% of a monthly
budget was wasted because nobody had added a single negative keyword to that campaign.
This campaign was spending $1,500 a month for a year. And over that year, that campaign
had wasted $13,500. So you see why this is so important.
How many negative keywords do you have in your campaign? Do me a favor. Let me know
in the comments section below, I'd love to hear it. And if you would like to download
our list of over 2,300 negative keywords that you can add to your campaign in just seconds,
all you have to do is click the link in the description area below, it will take you to
PPC Video Training, where you can see our PPC toolbox. There, you will get our negative
keyword list, as well as 11 other tools that we use in our campaign to save us thousands
of dollars in ad spend, as well as tons and tons of time each week.
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Google Ads videos. Thanks so much for watching. Hope to see you next time.