How 103bees (free for 30 days!) can help you save money by building negative keyword lists.
You know how every click “hurts” your advertising budget, if you are spending money on Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns to promote your sites. So what you don’t want: poorly targeted visitors to your site who don’t convert.
Bidding on keywords with ‘broad’ and ‘phrase’ match types (see keyword matching options for Google AdWords for example) often results in untargeted traffic and unprofitable advertising campaigns. Here’s an example: If you’re selling email software on your site and are bidding on “email software” (phrase match), PPC engines will also display your ads to people who are searching for ‘free email software’. They most probably won’t buy your software and you’re only losing money over them.
It’s a good idea to add negative keywords which are irrelevant to your conversion goals to your keyword lists. In the example above ‘free’ should be added as a negative keyword (‘-free’). And here’s how you build negative keyword lists with the help of 103bees:
- Log in to 103bees (if applicable: create a free account first)
- Select a website a.k.a. project of yours and go to the ‘Latest search hits’ section
- Download all search hits of the last 7 days to a comma separated file by clicking on the ‘export’ link
- Open the file in Excel and scan all search queries for keywords that won’t lead to expected conversions
- Go to your PPC program (Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing, …) and add these keywords to your keyword lists as negative keywords
Done - it’s that simple and it will save you hard earned money!