How to Avoid Certain Keywords
Whenever you're putting together a PPC ad campaign, you have to choose certain keywords to bid on. However many keywords are commonly associated with others that you may want to avoid. For example, if you sell baseball cards, you might want to bid on "baseball cards," "sports cards," and "cards." If someone searches "basketball sports cards," however, your ad might be shows, and you'll end up paying for a click that won't convert into a sale. So how do you avoid this? Well, the PPC Marketing Guide is currently featuring a post on how to exploit so-called negative keywords. As it explains:
Google refers to them as negative keywords, and Yahoo refers to them as excluded keywords, but they both accomplish the same result.
Negative keywords are a way of filtering when your ads are displayed. If someone performs a search query that contains one of your negative keywords, your ad will not be served.
This is a good practice that usually lowers your cost per acquisition and increases qualified traffic. The reason negative keywords are necessary is if your using a Broad match in Google or advanced match in Yahoo, your ads will be served every instance the users performs a search that include the term.
Of course, the Original Post goes on to elaborate much more detail on how to take advantage of such features of an adservers services, so you'll have to check it out if you want to know more.
