Blastmodo - A Blog about Search Engine Marketing

Negative Embedded Match is awesome.  Unfortunately a lot of people don’t know about it or use it.  

When talking to people in Search Marketing, there are two AdWords features, that I find many folks unaware of.  A shame becuase they’re really important.  These are definitely negative embedded match, and the impression share report (more on impression share in a future post).  

Anyways, negative embedded match is simple to use and even simplier to understand why and where you should use it.  Basically, negative embedded match lets you show ads for every variation of a keyword, except the keyword itself.  

Let’s look at a quick example:  Say I’m advertising on the term “Apartments in New York City”, broad match.  After a couple days of advertising, I review my search queries and find that “Apartments in New York City” is matching to “Apartments in New York”.  I definitely don’t want this traffic, as it’s not likely to convert (too broad/irrelevant). Problem is, I can’t just add “New York” as a negative, because that will kill all good “Apartments in New York City” traffic as well.

The solution, negative embedded match:

-[Apartments In New York]

Now, we’ll display for “Apartments in New York City” and all other variations that may have good ROI, and we won’t display for the overly broad “Apartments in New York” search query.

Negative embedded match is great because it can be utilized in so many different scenarios, where you want to prevent a certain keyword, but you don’t want to kill off all the other good long tail variations.  

Hope you can use negative embedded match to your AdWords advantage.  Next up in “The More You Know About AdWords” series will be “Impression Share Reports” !!  Woo, stay tuned!

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