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You know how Google Adwords provides you with opportunities to add suggested new keywords to your campaigns? Well, a lot of people in my office often complain about how bad those suggested keyword are. I look on the positive side and think they are great NEGATIVE keywords.
This is what I do with these suggested keywords that would otherwise bring tons of bad traffic to my campaign.
I download the opportunity file that contains the poor keyword from the Google opportunities application. You can do this by clicking on the down arrow icon.
This will download for you all of those great negative keywords in a spreadsheet format. You can take that spreadsheet and delete all of the unnecessary columns and rows. Now you have a great negative keyword list, ready to import into your campaign.
I like to use Adwords Editor to copy and paste the negatives into the campaign. I have to do a little clean up work first, but this only takes a few minutes. Since the data downloaded from Google will format the keyword match type as [Exact Match] “Phrase Match” and Broad Match, you need to get rid of those extra characters before you can import them using Adwords Editor.
Your spreadsheet program will allow you to do this with the “Search and Replace” tool. Select the column that contains your keywords, and then click on the Search and Replace link in your spreadsheet application. To remove all of the [ ] and “ characters, just type them into the find box and do not put anything in the replace box. That will remove those extra characters and leave you with plain text.
Now you can copy all of the cleaned-up negatives and, using Adwords Editor, add all of them to your campaign as negatives. Adwords Editor will import all of them as Broad match, but you can easily change them to phrase or exact if you like.
Thank you, Google, for all of these new negative keywords that will now keep away the traffic that Google mistakenly thought was relevant for my campaign.
Written By: Perry Pierce – PPC
