There are some great tools for finding negative keywords as your account accumulates impressions, I am surprised this article doesn't reference them.

Karooya.com negativekeywords.com wordstream.com/negative-keywords

Here is a great list of universal negative keywords... http://www.engineready.com/sem-resources/sem-newsletter/nega...

and finally, here is a shared google doc with negative keywords. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnWRJf6amhDYdEd...

I did not suggest any platform because I don't use any platforms. I prefer to do the work myself and that's the impression I wanted to convey to my readers.

Thank you for your suggestions though!

Oh, this is aimed at Google AdWords advertisers. It's not for negative keywords in queries.

Right, that's useful context, I couldn't make heads or tails of that article. So once you have that list, anyone got a clue what you should do with it?

That's an excellent question. I'll have to revise the article to go over what to do after you've created a negative keyword list.

Thanks

Sorry to disappoint, but you're correct the article was for Google AdWords Advertisers. However, I think everyone would benefit from an article about negative keywords in queries which I will try my best to write in the near future.

Thank you.

Certainly useful in queries as well.

The funniest thing I've seen is when people copy/paste a list of keywords from MS Excel and the heading on the top of their list is the word "Keyword". Then they end up bidding on the word "keyword".

hahaha, I have yet to see that happen but I don't doubt that it happens!

This might sound like (and is) really simple advice, but I just realized I'm totally not doing this with my own adwords campaigns, and have noticed the same kind of mistakes occurring frequently.

Props for a small piece of powerful and actionable advice.

That was the exact purpose of the post and thank you for recognizing it!

Thanks for reading; I really appreciate it.

Good tip, but likelihood of anyone clicking is low anyway and you don't pay for impressions. Time better spent on other areas such as ad copy.

If you take a look at your Search Terms Report, you'll realize that the likeliness is higher than you think. The Kanetix example was more on the extreme side, but it was there to make a point that bigger companies make these silly mistakes too.

You're not going to sit around for hours on end to craft the perfect ad copy - that's what A/B testing is for. However, you can (and I have) sat around for hours looking at a month's worth of keyword data. You may not agree with me (which is completely fine), but like I said clicks happen and that's money you could have saved.

It's simple advice, but it's something that a lot of people overlook - bringing it to everyone's attention was the purpose.