Keywords are extremely important to a pay per click advertising campaign. In essence, it is the element of a campaign that determines what traffic sees your advert be it if its search or display. For this reason, a lot of care and attention needs to go into the choosing of keywords to make sure that only the best traffic sees your PPC advert. This brings around the point of what type of keywords should you use?

 
For the majority, you will want to use keywords related to your campaign. For example, if you have an advertising campaign based around selling socks (terrible example, I know), you will have basic keywords such as ‘buy socks’ or more specific keywords such as ‘winter socks’ or ‘socks for men’ and then even more specific keywords depending how successful the keywords are for the campaign. The thing is, though, you can also have keywords that you don’t want to bid for – these are called negative keywords.
 
Negative keywords are keywords which you can choose to not bid on in a campaign so that your advert does not appear to the wrong target market. The problem is if you should use them or not? Here is the main reason to using them and the main reason against using negative keywords.
 
 

For – More Ad Views To Your Target Market

If you choose not to include negative keywords in your campaign, you are basically letting a proportion of your budget go towards funding adverts to be viewed by traffic that is slightly not relevant to your campaign’s contents. Therefore, by including negative keywords will prevent your advert from being viewed by the low converting traffic (which are low converting due to being not completely interested in your advert’s contents). Therefore, more of your budget (if not, all of it) will go towards the better converting keywords, making your campaign more successful in general.
 
 

Against – Choosing the Right Negative Keywords

The main problem against negative keywords is choosing the right ones. By this, you don’t want to be preventing your campaign from bidding on keywords you thought to be negative, when in fact they were actually doing quite well for your campaign!
Therefore, a word of warning is to do a lot of research into negative keywords before you implement them into your campaign so that you are 100% sure that they are low converting keywords and irrelevant keywords you don’t want to bid on.
 
Those are the main reasons to using and not using negative keywords. In practice, it is best to run a new campaign without negative keywords and then learn what keywords you are using that are low converting, remove them and then add some keywords to the negative list. Like with most things in pay per click advertising, it is about learning from your campaign with a bit of trial and error.