6 Surprising Ways to Use Google Adwords (Google Ads ) You Haven’t Tried Yet
4. Figure Out Who You’re Not Selling To
Imagine you sell software that helps independent physicians manage their medical practices. Your product is not designed for large healthcare systems, so you wouldn’t want one as a customer.
If you target keywords like “medical office management software,” you’ll reach your target audience. That’s great, but you may also get people searching for software to support the management of large practices.
This exact scenario happened to Beth Cooper, Marketing Manager at KNB Communications.
“The fact is, no matter how great your product is, there are some people you simply aren’t selling to,” said Cooper. “The trick is to figure out who those people are and think of keywords around them. AdWords lets you add them as ‘negative keywords,’ meaning they will not show your ad to people who use those search terms.”
By using negative keywords such as “hospital” and “large,” Cooper weeded out people searching for things like “hospital management software” or “large medical practice management solution.” She also used negative keywords like “free” and “open source” because the client wouldn’t want to pay for clicks if people were looking for a free software product.
Why is all of this important? Negative keywords can save you money, big time.
Remember: you pay for each click in an AdWords campaign. You don’t want to pay for clicks if the clicker most likely will never be a customer. So further targeting your campaigns will give you better bang for your buck.
Using negative keywords also improves the quality score Google assigns each of your ads. A better quality score means higher ad rankings and — you guessed it — a lower cost per click. The ultimate win-win.
