In a previous post (Different Engines, Different Tactics), I made the point that different tactics may be more effective for different search engines. In short, it's all about traffic volume.
Microsoft offers the opportunity to bid aggressively
on your core keywords, head terms rather than tail terms,
but there is a risk.
Marketing to the long tail makes more sense where high traffic volume supports the cost of maintaining large keyword inventories. If you're experiencing lower traffic, Microsoft, on the other hand, offers the opportunity to bid aggressively on your core keywords, head terms rather than tail terms, increasing your number of impressions served to an audience that is known for high conversion rates. There is a risk to this tactic, however.
Exposing your ads to a less qualified audience, people not really interested in your product or service, can result in decreased in CTR or worse, increased bounce rate on your landing page. CTR is critically important to your quality score and, consequently, your ad's position on the search page. Low CTR will cost you a higher bid amount to reach the same position as a competitor with higher CTR. And a bounce, someone who leaves your landing page after only a few seconds, costs you money without hope of a return. The short and simple version; low CTR or high bounce rate wastes your money.
Obviously, there's strong incentive to ensure you're displaying your search ads to the right audience. Long tail tactics such as exact match on keywords with multiple words serve as a strong qualifier but they also severely restrict the size of your audience. Targeting head rather than tail terms increases the audience size but requires different qualifying tactics.
The Paris Hilton Conundrum
Imagine you're managing search marketing for the Paris Hilton hotel. How to you target your ads to people actually looking for a room rather than the infamous heiress? One of the most powerful tactics to pre-qualify your audience is negative keywords.
Negative keywords are compiled much the same way you would positive keywords but for the opposite reasons. While doing your keyword research, you'll notice certain keywords returned for your queries that are completely unrelated to your product or service, keywords that are never likely to convert.
False positives, the exclusion of queries
truly relevant to your product or service,
are a risk when choosing negative keywords.
The Keyword Group Detection tool created by Microsoft adCenter Labs (adLabs) is useful for researching both positive and negative keywords. Paris Hilton returns an interesting list from the tool.
Fred Durst
Pamela Anderson
Jenna Jameson
Katie Price
Brittany Spears
Anna Nicole Smith
Beyonce Knowles...
Frankly, I need a tool to get a clue. I have no idea of Paris Hilton's relationships, no pun intended, but the Keyword Group Detection tool provides the connection. If I were managing the hotel's campaigns, I'd think seriously about including this list among my negatives. It might be even more efficient and just as effective to include only the last name in the string since the hotel might run hard against the adCenter negative keyword limit of 100 characters per keyword and 1,024 characters total.
You can associate negative keywords at the campaign, ad group, and keyword levels at the same time but only one level will be applied, in order of decreasing granularity, from keyword to campaign. Negative keywords applied at the keyword level take priority over all others; ad group negatives trump campaign negatives.
Another useful resource is adLab's Search Result Clustering tool which returns semantically related groups of words. In our example, likely negatives might include "heiress, model, actress, whitney, sex, nude, gossip, jail, celebrity..." Then again, celebrity might be a dubious choice since the hotel could legitimately be associated with celebrities. False positives, the exclusion of queries truly relevant to your product or service, are a risk when choosing negative keywords.
In adCenter, negative keywords aren't subject to editorial scrutiny. You can stuff your negative string with obscenities or competitors' trademarks with blissful disregard. After all, you're telling the engine you don't want your ad displayed for these objectionable or unethical keywords.
The Bottom Line
If you're pleased with the conversion rate of your adCenter campaigns and want to increase the number of impressions your ads receive, consider focusing on the head rather than the long tail of your campaigns. Focus on a few terms that are the core of your business, terms with broad appeal, and bid to place them on the first page of the search results but spend time building a bullet-proof set of negative keywords to qualify your traffic. Negatives applied at the keyword level are the most granular, the most specific, and the most powerful but also the most time consuming to identify. As you're testing this strategy, you can always place a daily limit on your campaign budget as a safeguard.
Negative keywords may be the most direct method of qualifying your audience but there are others - geographic and demographic targeting, dayparting, bid boosting -that I'll talk about in the last post of this series.