Adwords negative exact-match saved my campaign!

I have had a couple people ask me for more posts that are examples…so here is an example of something I ran into the other day.

I was optimizing some campaigns in adwords.  I noticed that although I had my adgroups broken out using ONLY 3 word+ longtail phrases, I was still getting a significant amount of traffic from a 2 word phrase that I was not bidding on.  I have seen this before and I believe it’s because I’m using broad match so it can just match with certain words out of the phrase.  I like to do it this way when I can to let a bunch of low cost longtail keywords trickle in without really much risk.

Well this was all fine and dandy, I was getting good conversions on a variety of keywords, but I was getting a lot of traffic on a term I was not bidding on.  To make matters worse it was like a huge portion of the traffic.

At first I wasn’t quite sure what to do..then it hit me negative exact-match!

In adwords, when you add negative keywords you can actually use negative phrase-match or negative exact-match…which most people are not aware of.

So what I did to solve my problem was add -[keyword phrase] to my campaign level negative list, and bam that keyword that was getting all the non converting traffic just got shut off!

This turned that campaign into an almost breaking even situation to earning some serious ROI now!

Moral of the story:  Filter your bad traffic out AS GOOD as you possibly can.  Watch your tracking and stats and find out what is NOT converting and GET IT OUT.  You can do this so many ways from dayparting to geographically, down to adding a good negative list (properly using the correct negative match type), blocking site urls and placements, etc.

If you have any good tips on how to filter out bad traffic, please, do leave a comment.