This post is related to a point in the previous post about geo targeting. If you already have a campaign running and you didn’t scrub out the non converting geo terms, or even if you have, this is an important step. You may have a completely clean keyword list, but if you are using phrase match (my favorite), you still need to negative geo target your campaigns, in order to not waste impressions on people that are tagging their searches with geo identifiers.
What does all that mean? Say I am running a campaign for dentists, and I am phrase matching the term “cosmetic dentist”. My offer is only valid in the US, so I don’t want to display for someone adding the term “London” to their search for “London cosmetic dentist”. So I need to negatively geo target “London” in my campaign wide negative keywords.
It’s really simple to negatively target. Just paste a list like this into your negative keywords. This list is the top 100 cities of the world with all US cities removed. But you can create lists of countries or provinces, whatever. Using these negative geo terms also helps cut down on the international traffic that gets diverted to other non-paying offers. Don’t forget, you still need to set your geo-targeting in the main campaign settings. But negative geo targeting by keyword will take care of searches tagged with geographic terms, and that can be up to 50% of searches in some niches.
I really need to start doing this, I am getting a ton of international traffic to one of my offers. I never thought of this!
Hi Chad,
Do you use phrase and exact negative keywords ? Do you need to put them like this : “example” and [example] ?
Thanks
a good tip i have used this on some products that i knew would be searched with Geo terms.
Menno- I just broad match my negatives with no quotes or brackets.
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