Let’s say you’re a car dealer bidding on the keyword “porsche”.

You’re targeting one of the last few yuppies in the country with a few quid left in his pocket, but your ad is be seen (and clicked on) by a child searching for a “porsche toy car”.

D’Oh!

Unless you target your ads exclusively using exact matching, you’ll never exclude irrelevant clicks altogether (and if you stick to exact matching only, you’ll miss out on a lot of relevant, profitable traffic).

But you can cut these irrelevant clicks by 95% or more, with a few simple steps.

Step 1:

When you are creating a campaign, you should use a keyword research tool, like Wordtracker to build a list of negative keywords.

Using the example above, you’d search for “porsche” and look through the results to see which ones aren’t relevant.

Some of these results include “porsche parts”, “vw porsche merger”, “porsche wallpaper” and some…. ‘actresses’ promoting adult websites.

Place these terms into your negative keywords list, which you can add to your account (either at a Campaign or Ad Group level), and these searches won’t trigger your ads anymore.

Step 2:

Once your ads have been clicked on 100 or so times, you should check your Google account to see which actual terms triggered the ad.

While step 1 will have removed the bulk of the high volume irrelevant terms, step 2 will take care of some of the ‘long tail’ searches.

With the original Adwords interface, you’d have to run a search report to get this information.

But with the new interface, simply click on the Keywords tab followed by the “see search terms” button, and you’ll see a list of the exact search terms used.

If you find a keyword you don’t want to trigger your ads, simply tick the checkbox beside it and you can add it to your negative keywords list.

Step 3:

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Let the ads run for another few hundred clicks, and repeat step 2. The repeat again.

While you may not exclude every single irrelevant search term, repeating the process a few times, will slash the number of unwanted clicks and help you improve your return from ad spend.

Slash Your Google Adwords Spend in 7 Days:

Want more PPC tips? Fill in your details below, and we’ll send you a tip a day for the next 7 days to help you avoid common mistakes and slash your Google Adwords Budget