Pay per click advertising is really a simple concept. Advertise on search terms relevant to your company's services or products, then pay for the clicks to your web site from the terms you've advertised on. I just explained it in one sentence. How hard can it be?

Well, it gets a bit more complicated when businesses start wildcarding their searches. For example, a printing company specializing in digital printing may choose to advertise on Google Adwords for -- of all things -- "digital printing" wildcarded. A term in quotes like that is considered a Phrase Match by Google, which means they'll serve the corresponding ad whenever someone does a search containing those two words in that particular order. Additional words could be present before or after that phrase.

Since the company is in the digital printing business, advertising to everyone using that phrase is a good thing, right? Well yes, to a point. But what if someone searches for [free digital printing]? Is that a valuable term? It would probably be hard to sell anything to someone who's looking for something for free, so the answer is probably "no." Or, what if the printing company doesn't do postcards? If that's the case, searches for [postcard digital printing] would be disappointing for both the printing company and the searcher who doesn't find what they're looking for.

So, what can be done to make the pay per click campaign work better for the advertisers (by saving them money) and searchers (who won't end up at sites who don't offer what they were searching for?

Negative Keywords

Adding negative keywords to a campaign will block an ad from showing on irrelevant terms. In AdWords, this is done by adding a minus sign before a term, like this:

-free
-postcards

This can be done at the Ad Group or Campaign level.

Since advertisers are charged by the click and have their ads ranked based on click through rate, displaying an ad on irrelevant search terms hurts in more ways than one.

When researching the term relevant to your advertising campaign, be sure note the terms use in conjunction with your targeted terms that don't happen to be relevant enough to warrant paid advertisements. Exclude those terms from your campaign using negative keywords, then watch your ad campaigns performance increase overnight.