After attending the Toronto SES conference, the Spark team has walked away with a basket full of great tips and improved techniques for SEO and SEM. One of my personal favourites was utilising a new report available to AdWords marketers. First, follow these steps to generate your report and then I will explain the value.
Step 1 – Access the reports tab and scroll down to the Search Query Performance report and select the radio button
Step 2 – In the Setting category select “Account”, “Summary” and the largest date range available to your account
Step 3 – Feel free to eliminate any columns you want to remove from the Advanced Settings section
Step 4 – Email the report to your address.
Once your report is available, open it up in Microsoft excel and focus on the keywords column.
Voila! What you have before you is the actual keywords and phrases that searchers used when they clicked on your ads. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT??? Well, because you can now glean any and all possible negative keywords that don’t generate relevant clicks on your ads.
A word of warning, negative keywords in one ad group may not apply to the next. Therefore, use the campaign negative keywords sparingly and stick to targeting your negative keywords in the appropriate ad groups.
