Successful PPC Management sometimes begins with a negative. That is…a “negative match.” When you are setting up your Google Adwords campaigns it is sometimes just as important to find “bad” keywords as it is to find “good” ones. Let me explain with a story.

There was a time last summer when my aging dog was down in her hips. I looked around on the internet and did what most animal-loving human beings would do and typed “hip problems for dogs” into Google. A bit of quick research later and I determined that the answer I needed relied on what is called a doggie wheelchair.

So next, I typed “doggie wheelchair” into Google. You can imagine my surprise when I found 10 PPC ads staring at me advertising doggie wheelchairs…or so I thought. Upon further investigation I determined that almost half of them weren’t advertising doggie wheelchairs at all. They were in fact advertising human wheelchairs. Now there were several multi-million dollar corporations that were inadvertently advertising to a pet-loving fanatic that had absolutely NO interest in human wheelchairs that spin around and cost thousands of dollars.

So what does that matter, you may ask? As long as someone doesn’t click on the ad, they don’t have to pay…right? WRONG! First of all, I must admit that I am like a lot of surfers and am click-happy. I don’t necessarily read every word of the ad before I click it. Lo and behold, I cost some poor multi-million dollar company a few dollars when I clicked on their ad for a product I did not want or need.

But what about the other ones that I had the sense to recognize weren’t pertinent before I clicked. Well, I must admit that I felt like “punishing” them for being so stupid by clicking on their ad for human wheelchairs, but I knew that they had already received punishment enough because I knew that Google was penalizing them with a lower CTR and that leads to a higher ad cost in the long run. CTR stand for “click-thru rate.” You see, even though I did not click on their ad, they paid. They paid in the form of higher ad costs down the road.

So why did they have to pay when someone did NOT click their ad and how does this affect your business? Let’s say you are an attorney and you bid on the keyword phrase “attorney”. Now someone comes along and searches for “free attorney”? If your search shows up, then you may get the click…ouch…unless you are free, but I highly doubt it. Or what if a high school student is doing a research paper on a legal subject and types in “articles about attorneys”. Oops, there you are again.

What if neither of the two examples actually clicks on your ad? Let’s say that no one is as click-happy as I am, does it still cost your money? You bet it does! Google is keeping score of your CTR and “rewards” you for getting more clicks. Yes, you may be happy that the freebie-seeker and the high-schooler didn’t click your ad, but by not clicking your ad they hurt your overall CTR and in the process helped to raise your rate.

To solve this problem and better profit with Google Adwords you you should know how to put “negative matches” in your Adword campaign. You would definitely want to tell Google that if a searcher includes “free” or “articles” then NOT to include your company in the search results. Before launching a Google pay per click campaign, you need to take the time to learn how to use the product and how to do proper research – not only for good keywords, but for the “bad” ones as well. If you can’t find the time, then hire someone who knows how to manage a successful Google Adwords campaign for you.