Are you targeting 21st birthdays at your cocktail bar, yet your ads are appearing for searches such as ‘kids birthday party venue’? Or perhaps you are advertising your restaurant for wedding receptions and your ads are showing for ‘BYO wedding venues’? Maybe you’re not even sure who’s seeing your ads but your Google Ads budget is being spent without generating more function bookings at your venue.

Importance Of Negative Keywords

When you’re paying per click through Google’s advertising platform, it’s important to ensure that those clicks are relevant to your venue’s goals. Adding negative keywords to your campaigns is one of the easiest ways to reduce budget strain.

How To Create Your List Of Negative Keywords

If you have active campaigns, the first thing to do is check your search term report. This is where you’ll find what users are typing into Google and triggering your ads. Make a list of all terms that are irrelevant and add these as negative keywords. Negative keywords have the same match types as keywords, that is: broad, phrase and exact.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

How To Use Negative Keywords

Let’s say that your keyword is: Wedding Venue Sydney

You find in your search term report the phrase: ‘Sydney venue for self catered wedding’

As your venue does not allow self catering, you would add ‘self catered’ as a phrase match negative keyword: “self catered”.

Why phrase match? If you added self catered as a broad keyword, you would then exclude yourself from searches such as: ‘Sydney wedding venue that is catered’ and ‘catered Sydney wedding venue.’

If that ‘self catered’ search term is costing you $20 a week in wasted clicks, by adding that as a negative term, you have freed that budget and could allow for 8-10 more clicks (based off $2 cpcs) on your relevant terms.

Improve Your Google Ads Campaigns Today

If you’d like some more tips on how to make that most of Google Adwords, get in contact with the experts at Merge Digital. We can help you set up and manage an Adwords campaign that will get you in front of your potential customers.