Sometimes it is easy to launch a new campaign and watch all the new traffic come in – but don’t forget the goal of the campaign and the importance of targeting the right audience.

Negative keywords are one way to help you target your campaigns to the right audience and not waste money on unrelated keywords.  Below are a few examples of advertisers that should add the negative keyword “pet” to their list.

Ideally you should be adding new negative keywords to your campaigns every week.  AdWords makes it really easy to add negative keywords directly into your campaigns from the Search Query Report.  This report will give you the exact queries visitors are using to click on your ads.  You can either access the report from the reporting center or directly in the AdWords interface (Campaigns > Keywords > See  Search Terms > All).  Not only is this report critical for negative keyword research, but it will also provide you with ideas for keyword expansion.

You are wasting money on untargeted traffic by not adding negative keywords to your campaigns.  Showing up for “pet health insurance” when you don’t offer pet health insurance is not helping your brand credibility.  Unwanted search queries do not offer any trust to your brand, thus damaging your reputation.

Moral of the story: don’t waste your media budget on unwanted traffic and take a chance with damaging your brand that you’ve worked so hard to build.

HealthCare.net, GreatHealthPlan.net and AARPHealthCare.com: add “pet” related negative keywords to your campaigns if you don’t offer pet health insurance.