SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

In paid search, a successful campaign is all about having good aim. Good aim involves excluding the people who aren’t likely to convert from seeing your ads to reduce your wasted spend, resulting in incremental top line growth for your business.

Adding negative keywords to your paid search campaign may seem a simple solution for improving its aim, but most of the time this isn’t enough by itself. Other factors that you must also take into consideration are:

• The level of targeting
• Whether to use keywords or lists
• The different match types of your negative keywords

Level of Targeting

Negatives are a filtering tool used to limit your potential impressions, thus your level of targeting. At the highest level, you can exclude impressions for entire campaigns, e.g. luxury brands will commonly want to avoid wasting impressions on search queries containing the words “free” or “cheap”. Thus these words would be added as negatives at the campaign level.

Alternatively, you can exclude impressions at the ad group level. One instance where you might want to do this is if you are running a campaign for a branded products. The keyword “Mossimo Sweaters”, for instance, may trigger impressions for ads in the Mossimo brand ad group, the sweaters ad group,  or a custom ad group built around both the brand Mossimo and the product sweaters. If you want to spend all your budget on the custom ad group, you can add “Mossimo Sweaters” as a negative keyword to the brand and sweaters ad groups so they don’t appear for that keyword, leaving more impressions to be had by your custom ads.

Keywords or Lists?

There are two ways to add negatives: through keywords combined with a match type or by using keyword lists.

• Keyword lists: These allow you to create and save groups of your commonly used campaign negatives. You can find this in the Shared Library section of your Campaigns tab.
  
  Once you form a list of negative keywords, you can apply it to your campaigns more efficiently than adding each individual keyword one by one. This is also the best option for excluding frequently avoided terms (“cheap”, “free”, adult terms, etc.)
  

• Match type: By default, Google adds negatives as broad match, but you can use any match type (broad match, phrase match and/or exact match) to fine-tune your list of negative keywords. To learn more about the different match type options, click here.

Negatives for Other Ad Types

Each type of ad requires some degree of filtering to opt-out of potentially useless clicks.

• Product listing ads work by connecting your product feed from your Merchant Centre account to your ad. These also have negative keywords which can be useful for handling product specific queries, such as size, colour or material.
• Display campaigns have two types negatives: excluded placements and excluded audiences. Excluded placements ads allow you to filter your ads from specific websites and web pages you don’t want your ads to show on. For example, you might want to prevent your display campaigns from appearing on apps or mobile sites. And the excluded audiences function groups the people you have cookied with an AdWords tag (usually for remarketing purposes) whom you wish to distinguish from the rest of your ad viewers. A common example is to filter out those who have already converted from your remarketing campaigns.

How to Find New Negatives

Here are some less common ways to discover additional negatives which you can use for your campaign.

• Keyword Research Tool: Rather than just accepting the list of negatives or search queries that have been auto-suggested to you by Google, run them through the keyword research tool to come up with synonyms and related terms. This is particularly useful if you’re planning on using more restrictive match types with your negatives.
• Organic Keywords: Filter your organic keyword report in Google Analytics for any words that may have a lot of clicks but hardly any conversions.

Excluding Impressions Without Using Negatives

Even if you’ve built out an extensive negative list, you can filter the way your ads appear with by using a few advertising and conversion rate optimisation tricks.

Text ads are the best way to qualify people before they click. Is your product for small businesses? Then you should consider adding the price to your ad to attract or filter out price-conscious consumers.

If your business is geographically specific, make sure your ad clearly mentions your locations, so locals can opt in and others will opt out.

Much like eating healthy and getting enough exercise, adding and refining negatives is a never-ending commitment. You will constantly need to work at it in order to keep your paid search campaigns optimised and running as profitably as possible. The good news is that it gets much easier the more you practice. And once you get to master it, your expertise with paid search negatives will allow you to play at a much higher, aggressive, and more cost-effective level than your competitors!

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Microsoft recently announced that its search engine Bing will soon go live with some major changes. A few of the more noteworthy updates for what Microsoft has dubbed “the New Bing” include a new sidebar, a snapshot of related information, and improved search results.

The Sidebar

A collapsible right sidebar shows looping social results. From here you’re able to ask Facebook friends, as well as see information from experts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, Foursquare and even Google+. This all-inclusive approach is in stark contrast to Google’s attempt to socialise search engine results with Search Plus Your World. Much of this design’s inspiration apparently came from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said “Don’t try to do social by building social on the side. Build it into the experience”.

In addition to its real-time activity feed, the sidebar has options such as asking friends, suggesting friends you might know, and referring people who know (the experts).

The Snapshot

Bing's Snapshot

The snapshot feature is very similar to how Google currently returns previews of Google Maps listings. It shows information such as reviews, directions, contact info, trading hours and more.

Improved Search Results

According to Microsoft, the new Bing should be much faster, less cluttered, and more relevant. Though these latest updates to its algorithm have a social focus, Bing will continue to show its core web results instead of cluttering its SERP with social updates. This allows Bing users to focus on the web links they need to get the information they want. With Bing surpassing Yahoo in search market share early this year in U.S., it is slowly edging closer to Google – though the Big G remains the dominant player.

The changes to Bing are slated for an early June release in the United States, with the rest of the world to follow shortly afterward.

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On the second Sunday of May we honour and dedicate all our love to the woman who gave us life and shaped us into the person we are today.

So, besides valuable time together, what else were our mothers hoping for this year? Increasingly, our mums are getting techy on us! At least 58% of mums can work basic gadgets, with over 91% preferring to receive an iPad over flowers. Gone are the days, it seems, when your mother would ask you how to send an SMS. Here are some of the techy highlights for Mother’s Day this year:

[Via: TechBargains]

Now for the fun part! What awful name can we appoint to this new wave of mothers day gift giving? iMum? Mum 2.0? Leave your suggestions in the comments!

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