So here is a little mini-series that will look into ways you can save money on your PPC campaign, code named ‘Save PPC Budget by’ (I know, it’s original). There is a general problem with PPC articles online that people concentrate too much about getting lots of clicks, lots of ad impressions and so on. However, improving a PPC campaign does not always mean to tweak what is in a search advert or to change your campaign to a high CPC strategy. Optimizing your PPC campaign can also mean to make it run more efficiently – after all, the most important statistic of any PPC campaign is the cost per conversion, isn’t it?
 
With this in mind, here is the first way you can save money on your PPC campaign: by including negative keywords.
 

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords, in essence, are keywords which you do not want your advert to show up for. They are the keywords that generate poor conversion rates for your campaign (therefore, you want to prevent your advert from being displayed when people search them).
 
An example of the use of negative keywords could be a PPC campaign by Apple, where they are wanting to promote their new Macbook. As we all know, Apple is a premium brand for technological products with premium prices too. Therefore, a good use of negative keywords for Apple’s PPC campaign would be to not include anything that has ‘cheap’, ‘free’, ‘budget’ or any other keyword that can relate to saving money when purchasing a laptop. At the end of the day, the people that are looking at cheap budget laptops are extremely unlikely to purchase a $1,000+ Macbook. Therefore, if they clicked on the Apple advert, Apple would be paying for traffic that are not likely to convert – this is why negative keywords can save PPC campaigns money. By preventing your advert from being triggered by poorly performing keywords means more budget can be allocated to bidding for the top keywords in your campaign that perform the best.
 
 

Identifying Negative Keywords

The main problem with adopting negative keywords is in understanding what should the negative keywords for your campaign be. There are two possible approaches you can take to finding the negative keywords for your campaign:

1. Run a campaign without any negative keywords. Using analytical reports, look at what keywords are performing the worst for you and include them onto the negative keyword list.
2. Brainstorm ideas to what keywords would generally not perform well for you and include them onto the negative keyword list before the PPC campaign goes live.

Of course, point 1) will take up more budget to begin with as it will be running inefficient. But, after the test trial, you may have a better idea about what are the negative keywords of your campaign unlike what the second option is, which bases the negative keywords on your perception alone.