Your boss complained about their ads matching to 'vegan hotdog', so you need to take a look at the search terms we're matching to and add negative keywords where relevant.

Ok I get it
Google's matching isn't the greatest
But surely it's obvious we shouldn't be bidding on 'vegan hotdogs'!?
I'm not sure why you didn't set this up as a negative to begin with
What other bad keywords are we matching?
Let's get this rectified
Can you do a search query report?

Search query reports are among the highest value things you can look at when running a PPC account. Google is notoriously unreliable when it comes to matching to relevant keywords: what does it matter to them if your ad spend is being wasted? This is something you need to monitor religiously yourself to make sure you can drive performance.
Google and other search engines usually provide some visibility into what you matched to. You can go through these matches and then find the ones that aren't relevant. For example there are some keywords that are completely irrelevant ("vegan hotdogs" if you sell beef hotdogs). There are other negatives you want to add to divert spend to the right place. For example if you're matching to a competitors name in your generics account, you want to add a negative at the campaign level in generics to divert spend to the right place.

Negative Keywords

Hey, let's learn how to do a negative keywords report. Okay. So this is the search terms report that you typically get from Google ads. You can export that from the platform and it gives you you know, what you match to what, what search terms you matched to what ad group that was in that the match occurred.
And then some performance data as well. For this account, we don't have conversions. It's just clicks. Cool. So what do we need to do? We need to go through all the chemo. And we need to see which ones are relevant to to the client. So some things will be relevant. Some things won't be you can see we've got some, you know, competitor terms in here you know, bacon wrapped, hot dogs you know, if they don't sell bacon, wrapped hot dogs.
And this is a good example of something we want to decrease as a negative. And if you add a negative or you can add it. Of three different stages. So one is the account level and that's something that would be irrelevant to the client in general. Like it's something they don't sell. It could be the campaign level, like you know, maybe we don't want it to match to the hotel campaign because it's a competitor's name and it should match to the competitor.
Campaign instead or it could be at the ad group level. So maybe it is, you know, in the generics campaign, it should be in that, but it shouldn't match to the ad group. Hotdog in particular that's, what's called a cross matching negative and that's basically just like redirecting spend to the right place and making it more efficient that way.
Because then you're going to be able to show a, you know, be able to show an ad that's more relevant to what the purchase, you know, person's search. Cool. So when I'm doing this, I tend to make two more columns and one is the negative or negative keyword, I should say. And then the other is the negative level and the negative level is going to be one of three things.
Sorry, I'm just going to if we. Kind of click there and then control down. That gets us to the very bottom of the field and then we can press control, shift up and then hold shift and then press down. Okay. So what I'm doing there is kind of navigating around a much quicker. I can select the whole thing much easier.
Okay. So. We're going to go to data validation. And then we're going to say, we want a list of items and we're going to say, is this an account level, negative, a campaign level, negative, or an ad group level negative. And they're gonna hit. And then that just gives us this dropdown. So we can say if there isn't a negative that we're adding what level should we add it?
We can also add some additional formatting here if you want to. But I'm not going to bother for this tutorial. Okay. The second thing we need to do is let's select everything. So if I click in here and I press control a that's like the whole data sheet and then I want to go to data and I want to create a filter.
And the reason that we're going to do this is because we want to sort this by impressions. We're going to go short so the keyword with the most impressions is at the top. You can also do, you know, the most cost. But I, I, you know, almost clicks I prefer most impressions because it gives you a good idea of keywords where you're getting a lot of impressions, but it's not actually relevant.
So a really good example here is hot dog cut for sale. So this is something that we don't want to bet against because when selling hot dogs, we're not selling hot dog cuts. So in this case, we're going to add it's actually going to say for sale, and this is a phrase match negative. I almost always just use phrase match negatives because then it's a much cleaner you can kind of get rid of any time we match to for sale.
Because You know, if the keyword contains for sale now we're not going to match to it. So yeah, if someone searches hot dogs for sale, we're going to lose out on that. But I don't think that's a particularly big keyword, so I think we should be safe here. And that is an account level negative.
Cause it's something we never want to match to. Another example could be you know, if we look at so like Feltman's hot dogs maybe that's a competitor Feltman. So we shouldn't be matching to the generic campaign. We should be matching that to the competitor's campaign. So, you know, we can add that keyword in later, don't worry about adding keywords yet.
Let's just add this, you know, Feltman's you can just do Feltman in this case because then it will match to any kind of variation. And then this is just a campaign logo level negative. Because that's something that's going to matter. You know, it shouldn't be matching to the generics campaign at all.
There's a competitors campaign. And then let me find an example of something that, you know, should match to the generics campaign, but not specifically to a hot dog. So let's say if we look at like, Be Franks. Maybe we want to specifically call out the fact that we use and our hot dogs.
And in this case we want to kind of create a new ad group called beef. So if we if we, but that is beef as a negative and then put that at the Abbott group level then we know that. Beef Franks is you know, is something that is in the generics campaign, but it shouldn't be matching to this broader hot dog term.
Okay. So that's the three different examples, you know, account level negatives. So these are things that are completely irrelevant. Another one is campaign level negatives, which is something that's relevant, but not specifically for this campaign. Needs to be in the competitor's campaign instead. And then this is an ad group level negative, cause it's still relevant to this campaign, but just should be in this separate ad group where we can specifically call out in the ad that it's a beef hot dog.
Okay. So the other thing we need to do is add up how much spend we've saved. So the way that you do that is if we say, you know, equals some F. You can see the sum if formula is the range criteria on the summer range. So the range that we're matching to this is gonna be. And then you're just going to select that and risk control shift down.
That's going to select the whole thing. It can compress F for to make that an absolute reference. So it's not going to change if you drag that around. And then criterion we want it to match the QA. Count. And then the sum range. If if that matches account, I, then we want to some the same row over here for costs.
So again, if we just press control shift down, oh, it didn't work for some reason. You know, the other actually the other way to do this, if you just copy this. Range and then you paste it and then instead of E it's raw, it's called I so just change that. Okay. And we can see that we have one keyword that we spend 125 bucks on.

So that makes sense. So that's how you sum up that if we add another. You know, account level of negative here, we have your Turkey. If we don't sell Turkey hotdogs. So add an account level negative here, and we can see that now this is updated and it includes the spend for both. So you could do the same thing again, if you want to add up the campaign and ad group level negatives, and that will tell you how much spend was redirected versus how much spend was wasted entirely.
If it's an account level negative, then it's wasted. Okay. Hopefully that was useful. You know, it's a really tedious piece of work but you know, but it's probably the biggest thing you can do on a week to week basis to improve the performance of your Google ads campaigns.

Add negatives for all irrelevant matches at the account level, assuming Dogshed sells halal beef hot dogs. How much money have you saved?

Add negatives for any Campaign or Ad Group level mismatches. What amount of spend will be redirected?

What should you be careful about when adding phrase match negatives (i.e. keyword contains "for sale")?

Can you do a search query report?

Your boss Googled "vegan hotdogs" and saw one of your ads appear. Just one problem... our hotdogs ain't vegan. What other irrelevant terms are you bidding on? 

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