I don’t go every often but when I get the chance I love Scuba diving – the last time was in Grand Cayman quite a few years ago now. It was an amazing experience.
Anyway, because of this, whenever I do training on Google Adwords, I quite often use ‘scuba diving’ as an example topic, because I can talk about every type of site from e-commerce shops selling scuba equipment, through to dive centres, certified training courses and so on.
So this morning I was writing an article on Google Adwords for the next issue of my Web Profits Monthly newsletter, explaining how to structure campaigns for maximum return.
I needed a screen shot (illustration) to go with my article so I went to Google and ran a search on the phrase ‘scuba face mask’ and here’s the screen I got…
Now you can see I’ve highlighted some parts of the screen red — those are adverts offering me ‘swine flue’ or ‘surgical masks’… in other words poducts that are totally irrelevant to what I was looking for.
It’s crazy advertising, and here’s why…
Obviously I was looking for a scuba face masks. The word scuba was in my search phrase.
I was not looking for face masks to help me avoid getting swine flu, or to help me operate on anyone!
Now, the swine flu pandemic is of course on my mind. So I could quite easily have clicked any of those adverts out of general interest.
Had I done so, my click would have cost those advertisers money – and I’m guessing quite a lot of money, because the adverts I’ve highlighted in red were at the very top of the page, which is the most expensive place to have your Google adverts.
And if I had clicked, how likely would I have been to buy a swine flue face mask?
Not very!
In other words those advertisers are potentially losing money by getting untargeted clicks – people who click the advert out of interest but who are not actual prospects.
Google Adwords can cost a lot. If you want a Google Adwords account that helps grow your business — and doesn’t just bleed your credit card dry with nothing to show for it — then you need to advertise smart.
Use Negative Keywords.
All those advertisers need to do to minimise untargeted clicks is to add words like ‘scuba’ as what are called negative keywords, which tell Google Adwords when not to display adverts.
In this case those retailers who are advertising swine flu masks should have negative keywords that prevent their adverts from displaying when I search one ‘scuba face masks’, and also any other type of face mask that is not swine flue related. (Motorbiking, BMXing, cycling, swimming, and so on.)
That’s all it takes, but they’ve failed to do this simple step and I reckon it’s costing them money.
If you’ve not yet tried Google Adwords for your business then I thoroughly recommend it – the impact on customer acquisition and sales-lead generation can be nothing short of staggering… just don’t make the same mistakes these advertisers are making!
Ed.
P.S. I covered negative keywords in a lot of detail in last month’s issue of Web Profits Monthly – you can get back issues from here, but it’s a lot cheaper to get them on subscription.
