Within Adwords you can use Googles keyword tool to find possible negative keywords which you can add into your campaign in either campaign level or ad-group level. Doing this will increase your click through rate, reducing cost per click and a lower cost per conversion.

Start with words like free or cheap which if your running a business most likely are not the customers you are looking for if your trying to sell products. You will need to do this for all your campaigns and ad-groups and if you don’t find negative keywords then your doing something wrong. Need help with your Adwords campaign?

I personally feel that this is a negative aspect to Google Adwords which unfortunately due to legal issues I’m sure Google is required to comply to some degree but I’m not a lawyer so I wouldn’t know so don’t sue me!

Why I find this a frustrating issue is that many online business selling products are in fact being penalised by the companies that supply them. For example manufacturing company Widgets Inc (not a real company that I know of) makes widget chairs and an online shop owner Wadgets Online shop (another fictional shop) sells these widget chairs using Adwords as part of their campaign but when they want to use the keyword ‘widget chairs’ in their campaign keywords or ad text, they get a big no no from Adwords because this keyword has been restricted by the trademark owner, forcing them to use a less relevant keyword to try to sell these chairs.

Umm sorry but I don’t think that benefits the end user, online shop owner or the manufacturing company who applied the trademark restriction in the first place. So the user can’t find the product they want, the online shop owner loses a sale and the manufacturer sells one less widget. So you tell me, who wins now?

For legitimate reasons Google does allow you to request an exception which will be reviewed by the Adwords team however you’ll have to cross your fingers and wait for the outcome.

Earlier this year Google introduced their Adbot designed to crawl your website landing pages to determine their quality.  The more relevant your landing page is to your targeted keywords then the higher a quality score your landing page will receive.

This quality score is factored into your overall cost per click effectively meaning you could reduce your cost per click, pay less than your competition and rank higher in the sponsored listings.

My recommendation is to do on-page search engine optimisation to your landing pages which will soon pay for itself in reduced advertising costs and higher conversions.