Defining negative keywords can be a long, slow arduous task. Either by guesswork or by trawling through loads of enquiry data, most businesses just do not have the time to search for irrelevant keywords and simply end up with a few negative words in their campaigns.

We’ve personally fallen foul of not implementing negative keywords which is why we built a great solution to automate the whole negative keyword process. You can check it out at KeywordTerminator.com and also pick up our Free White Paper, Be Positive – Go Negative.

Cheers, Steve

Good Information about the negative keywords.

Despite your experience Adwords is a wodnerful way of promoting your product/services online and frankly nothing comes close to gathering data quickly about your prospects and customers.

There are NO shortage of companies and amatuers that say they CAN when they CAN’T..

Negative keywords are key to your success, and having a firm that understand the ins/outs of this industry is key as well….

You can go trial & error and still win, but it will cost you..

Good luck and great post..

I don’t know exactly the situation of your AdWords account managers, so I won’t comment on it, but from what I have noticed, there are a few ways of testing whether a product can be advertised through AdWords or not.

I would recommend testing AdWords for a month with a minimum investment, let’s say 100$: set tracking codes on the BUY action (make sure you add the code on the Thank you page) and set your goal to have a cost per conversion smaller that the actual price of the product and make sure to follow the account daily.

After the first month, if you choose to continue and notice that things don’t go as planned, you can just pause the campaign until you rethink your strategy (this is one of the most beautiful parts of AdWords, unlike most of the other advertising channels – that you can pause it in the moment you feel like it:).

Of course, AdWords performance also depends on the product quality, on the need for it on the targeted market, on how well is the campaign targeted and so on.

We will try to create a report on industries that don’t mix well with AdWords from our experience. In the meantime, if you want to, I would be happy to take a look at your AdWords account (no strings attached) and offer you my opinion on your specific case. Contact me at adriana dot iordan @ avangate dot com if you’re interested.

I’d love to see an article on Adwords that looks in depth into the question of when Adwords is worth using and when it is not (based on product, target user base, price of product, etc.)!