Increase your ROI with negative keywords

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25% all of searches are totally brand new
If you advertise through search engine pay per click and use nothing but exact matches you will be running a very tight ship but you will also be missing out on a lot of potential (and relevant) traffic from keywords you haven’t thought of. With 25% of all searches thought to be completely unique (i.e. they have never been used by anyone ever before) you can’t possibly cover every single search term as an exact match.

Spending time to build up your negative keyword list will:

• Save you a lot of money!
• Increase your click through rate
• Increase your quality scores
• Increase your ROI

Use a combination of match types
On the other side, if you use broad match and phrase match keywords you run the risk of seeing your advert triggered alongside a keyword that isn’t actually related to your site. For example, if you bid on ‘web banner design’ as a phrase match you would also be shown for ‘FREE web banner design’. Common sense may suggest you change it to an exact match but you would then miss out on ‘GOOD QUALITY web banner design’ etc. Negative keywords act to prevent this from happening and don’t be surprised to find your negative keyword list is much larger than your keyword list (for one of our campaigns we have just under 400 negative keywords).

Finding your negative keywords
When it comes to finding your negative keywords the first step is to think of the situations you don’t want to have your advert shown with:

• You don’t offer that service e.g. ‘Free’
• You don’t want your advert to be associated with that keyword e.g. ‘porn’
• You don’t want to be shown at the research stage of the buying cycle e.g. ‘reviews’
• You don’t trade in that region e.g. ‘Sheffield’
• Etc.

A lot will come from common sense and your own industry experience. For example, amongst our own no brainers were ‘free’, ‘sex’ and ‘adult’. But don’t just stop there. Others will be less obvious (and some positively bizarre) and require you to use keyword research tools.

Google’s keyword tool
From within your AdWords account simply run the report using your most generic keywords (e.g. ours would be ‘web hosting’ etc) and from the list it generates pick out those you do not want to be shown for and add them as a negative keyword (e.g. ‘adult web hosting’).

Microsoft’s keyword mutation
It may sound like a zombie version of one of their products but it is in fact a really useful tool which shows you common misspellings and pluralisation of keywords. For example the keyword “Messenger” comes back with 35 different ways people spell it including ones you couldn’t guess at (e.g. “messemger”).

Microsoft’s keyword group detection
Another nifty tool from Microsoft. This one shows keywords that are related or similar to your keyword. For example “web hosting” brings back results for “dedicated hosting”, “domain hosting”, “isp” and “conference calling”.

Google analytics (GA)
One of the reports with GA shows you the searches used to find your web site. You can split these out in to ‘paid’ and ‘non-paid’. Scrawl through the ‘paid’ list and pick out any keywords you spot you don’t like the look of.

Google suggest
A recent graduate of their labs, this nifty tool offers search suggestions for you to choose from. From this list you can jot down some more negative keyword ideas. Follow these instructions to turn on Google suggest (currently only enabled on google.com and not google.co.uk).

Make Money from Your Website

INSTA Host gives it’s customers a helping hand to make money online from advertising by allowing you to easily install an ad server from our CGI script library onto your website. OpenAds is a feature rich advertisement suite allowing webmasters to easily incorporate banner advertisements onto your website with minimal effort.

Below is a helpful guide on ways you can make money from your website through advertising.

Direct Banner Advertising

Graphical banner advertisements tend to be very effective and as a result a great source of revenue. As you will be in complete control of who is advertising, you essentially eliminate the middle-man allowing you to keep 100% of the profits. It’s not as easy as using Advertising Programs such as Google Adsense, who take care of the selling for you, it’s completely down to you to contact potential advertisers and convince them why they should advertise on your website. When approaching advertisers it’s a good idea to present to them reasons why they should advertise on your website. Good traffic statistics, including page views and unique visitors, will help your cause. Try and give as much positive information as you can. It’s also worth adding an “Advertise” link on your website, allowing people to easily enquire about advertising rates, opening up the opportunity to make a sale.

The following is a list of the most popular banner sizes used:

Horizontal:
Leader board: 728 x 90 pixels
Full Banner:  468 x 60 pixels
Half Banner: 234 x 60 pixels

Vertical:
Skyscraper:  120 x 600 pixels
Wide Skyscraper: 160 x 600 pixels

Rectangle:
Standard Rectangle:  180 x 150 pixels
Large Rectangle:  336 x 280 pixels

CPC (Cost-Per-Click) Advertising Programs

There are many CPC advertising programs available on the internet, the most popular is Google Adsense (http://www.google.com/adsense/).  Adsense serves advertisements onto your website that are targeted to the content of each page, having relevant ads will result in a higher click-through rate. It’s good practice to have ads that blend into the content of your website as they will appear more natural and increase the chances of visitors clicking them. Google Adsense allows you to customise the ads to your needs – including the size and format, e.g. text, image or video and link colours. Should you get unwanted advertisements appearing on your website, Adsense has a competitive ad filter so you can block certain sites from showing. Adsense is a very easy way to make money from your website as it requires minimal effort to setup and it takes care of displaying relevant advertisements for you.

Affiliate Schemes

You can also make money from your website by joining an affiliate program where you can earn commissions by referring visitors to a website where they perform certain actions, e.g. purchase a product. INSTA Host offers an affiliate program allowing you to earn a 10% commission on all domain and hosting sales that where referred from your website.

OpenAds Support
Should you need any help with your installation of OpenAds please visit the official support site

Support Page:
http://www.openx.org/support

Forum:
http://forum.openx.org/