We, at Karooya, are strong advocates of the usage of negative keywords in paid search advertising. The impact it has on the advertising spend cannot be missed. As a result, it is critical to monitor your negative keywords to prevent budget exhaustion.
One of the common questions that we have come across is about the frequency of generating negative keywords. In this post, we intend to address when is generating negative keywords a more frequent effort than when it can be taken up once a week (or a frequency that depends on the account size)
Launch of a campaign
When you start a new campaign, the intent is to drive traffic that can be later narrowed down to a more targeted one. So advertisers plan to start with a wide range of keywords (that meets the campaign objective) and track it on a daily basis to pull out a constructive list of keywords as well as negative keywords. During this stage, an audit needs to be done on a regular basis to avoid your account from spending too much on unwanted terms.
After you have run the campaign for a couple of months and are able to extract valuable insights, you can decide to carry a more targeted approach with fewer keywords and restrict them with appropriate match types. During this stage, you can review for negative keywords every week and thereafter increase the frequency once the budget and keywords have been blocked.
Using Broad match type
If you are using broad match type for your targeted keywords, then you have opened your reach to limitless options. Not that using broad match is a wrong choice, but it just needs close monitoring of the search terms that your ad is showing for. So, if you have used broad match type then review your search terms more often to avoid any wastage of ad spend. Ideally, broad match type is best used when advertisers are building their keyword list. Once decided on that, you can use the other match types for a more targeted approach.
High spend accounts
Accounts with a high daily spend might want to keep a close watch on maintaining their campaign performance, by removing terms that are underperforming or not leading to any conversions. For such accounts, keeping a daily tab on the search terms helps stop the ad budget from getting depleted on unwanted terms.
In other cases
We will discuss a couple of case scenarios here:
1. Campaigns that have been running for quite some time, might need to be reviewed once in two weeks, a frequency that you can decide basis the number of keywords or the match type used
2. Accounts that are larger in size, meaning accounts with a greater number of campaigns might need regular reviewing. It might get tedious to review all campaigns at one go, so you might have to closely track which campaigns got reviewed when, and when it needs to be revisited.
3. By employing phrase match or exact match type in the past, the reach of your keyword would have been restricted. However, with the match type change the limit has been widened. As a result, it becomes crucial to review accounts using phrase match or exact match in at least a span of 10-15 days.
As you can notice, negative keywords need dedicated time and manpower. The burden of performing this tiresome activity is greatly lessened with automated tools like ours. We do the digging and you decide to add that recommended negative keyword. If you haven’t yet given our tool a try then learn more about it here.
Here is an interesting discussion on Reddit about the topic that we have discussed.
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