The more experience you have with pay per click advertising, the more you start to realise that there are so many 
different ways you can improve a campaign to ultimately get the results you want. One of the ways advertisers can improve their campaign is with negative keywords. Not only can negative keywords improve your results, they will also make the whole of your campaign much more cost effective.
In layman’s terms, negative keywords are the keywords you do not want your advertising campaign to bid on. Therefore, your advert will not appear on search results which include the negative keywords you chose in your campaign. Why would you want to do this?
- Increase campaign’s performance – If you are reducing the chance that your advert will appear on search results with negative keywords, you are, in essence, preventing traffic that have no interest in your campaign from clicking onto your search advert. Clicks from negative keywords never convert because they are mistaken due to being wrongly targeted. If less traffic goes to waste, more of your campaign’s time will go towards converting contextual traffic which is exactly what you want.
- Save money – As well as increasing your campaign’s performance, it will also save you, potentially, a lot of money. This is because the traffic produced from negative keywords do not usually convert. Therefore, you are preventing non-interested traffic from clicking on your advert.
- More targeted, the better – My general rule of thumb for pay per click advertising is that the more targeted your campaign is, the better the results you will achieve. This is because a highly targeted PPC campaign will attract a more specific type of market that are more likely to convert. Therefore, any way in which you can make your campaign more targeted is a welcome to PPC. Although you do not change what you are targeting your campaign at with negative keywords, you are on the whole targeting more traffic that you want to which is a good thing.
However, the main problem advertisers face with negative keywords is choosing the right negative keywords. If you make a mistake and block your campaign from being shown to a keyword search phrase that does convert, then you will be wasting your campaign away!
For this reason, take a great deal of time when it comes to choosing your negative keywords. I tend to do a lot of research into my market, my campaign and duplicated testing campaigns to make sure I am 110% sure I have chosen the right negative keywords. Due to this, use negative keywords with caution because if done wrong, they have the potential to ruin the whole of your campaign!
