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Targeting Visitors for Software Companies using Google Adwords Negative Keywords.

November 3rd, 2009 // 11:30 am @ Uri

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I have recently been in talks with software as a service firms that are running Google Adwords campaigns and are complaining of very high cost of conversion.

The basis of a FAILED campaign.

My two first questions to them are:

1)Â Are you running these campaigns yourself?
2)Â Are you running negative keywords on these campaigns?

Look, DYI Google Adwords is certainly a steep learning curve. This learning curve costs YOU money.

Negative keywords are a root cause of most failed search campaigns.

This post is geared towards software companies that are utilizing the paid search environments as part of their online marketing mix.

First and foremost if you are unclear as to what negative keywords are you can read about them here.

One of the most UNDERUTILIZED ways of acquiring a negative keyword list is your own data, under your nose.

Print out a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly report (depending on volume) of the keywords being used to find your website. This data can be acquired through your organic data source or through Adwords own, Search Query Performance report.

Sift through these reports and you will notice many negative keywords that just do not apply to your product or service.

Here is a list of generic ones that I use for my ppc campaign management and I use as a starting point.

To negate freeloaders I use the following:
free
freeware
gratis
kostenlos
gratuit
â€œpublic domainâ€
â€œopen sourceâ€

To negate people looking for cracks or pirated software:
crack
cracks
cracked
crackz
key
key gen
keygen
keygens
key gens
key generator
key gens
keygenz
â€œregistration keyâ€
â€œlicense keyâ€
pirated
pirate
patch
patches
rapidshare
rapid share
serial
serials
serialz
wares
warez
unlock
unlocking
hack
hacked
hacks
password
torrent
torrents
torrentz
bittorrent

Programmers love to click on ads to search for sample code:

c++
delphi
php
flash
xml
visual basic
ajax
vb
api
excel
java
code
source
template
templates
model
example
sample
xls
xsl
sheet
schema
project

What about negating exact terms such as:
[software]
[program]
[programs]
[shareware]

The above are just a quick sample which might help my readers out in running their own campaigns. It is certainly NOT an exhausted list.

Negative Keyword Search is imperative to your paid search success.

As a Pay Per Performance PPC Management Company we take as much of the guesswork out of our PPC Managed Campaigns as we can. Not because we can, because we have too..

I hope this helps..

Good luck.. And good marketing..

Cheers,

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