Many of the ‘homemade’ accounts that I see, make no use of negative keywords, which is a serious mistake. Here’s the deal, if you type in your keywords without quotation marks for phrase match, or square brackets for specific match. Then your keywords are all set for what Google calls ‘Broad Match’. This means that ANY search phrase containing your keyword phrase (in any order) will return your ad.

Example:

Your keyword listing for “ice cream” (without the quotation marks) will display your ad when the following phrases are searched on:

ice cream maker
ice cream franchise
ice cream recipe
ice cream flavor
ben and jerry ice cream
ice cream parlor
ice cream addiction

Assuming that you don’t offer all of these products/services on your website, you have a problem because your ad is less relevant, and will get a lower CTR – and that means a higher cost per click.

If your site sells ice cream makers, you should use word such as “franchise” and “parlor” as negative keywords, so that your listing would not appear for these search phrases.

How to use it:

Typically I add negative keywords at the Ad Group level, which is very simple. Click the “Edit Keywords” link and simply add your negative keywords to the bottom of your keyword list. They should be formatted with a minus sign and no spacing. Example: “-addiction” (without the quotation marks).

Google have built-in an incredibly powerful capability to split test your ads.  This means that when you create multiple ads for an Ad Group, Google will display them alternately, and track which one gets the best response rate (measured in click-throughs). 

This is important for two reasons.  Because of the Quality Score calculation, you pay less for ads with a higher click-through-rate, and secondly, a higher CTR usually means more visitors to your site (and more opportunities to sell).

How to use it:

At the ‘Ad Group’ view level, you’ll see a “New Text Ad” link next to the display of your existing ad.  Click this button, and ‘presto’, you’ll have the fields to complete to create a new ad. 

Once you’ve had multiple ads for a period of time, you can scroll to the bottom of the Ad Group page to see the CTR, and CPC for each ad.  It’ll also show you the percentage of time that these ads were show.  All of this data is for the time period you have selected in the drop-down box above the clicks stats columns. Beware of jumping to hasty decisions – unless you’re getting thousands of visits per day.  You probably want to let each ad version run for a week or more before deciding to delete the loser, and make a new competitor.