Without doubt, if you want your ads to be shown to the widest audience possible, you’ll want to set your keywords to ‘broad match’. But, if you have not created a large list of negative keywords for your campaign, then you are likely to be very disappointed with your results.

Given this fact, you’ll want to know how to create a meaningful negative keyword list for all your broad match keywords.

Many people use a keyword tool like Google’s to find targeted keywords for their AdWords campaigns. If you are like most, you’ll look at your list of keywords and pick only the most targeted, discarding the rest.

The right thing to do with those discarded keywords is to use them to create your negative keywords list.

To some this might seem strange, but think about it for a moment. Your keyword tool has discovered all those non targeted keywords when searching your niche. Google obviously thinks they maybe relevant and it’s up to you to tell AdWords otherwise.

Even More Negative Keywords

Having completed your initial AdWords negative keywords list, you’ll now want to expand your list based on your keywords performance.

When you start using a ‘broad match’ keyword for the first time, make sure you run a ‘Search Query Performance’ report at least once a week.

When you see keywords in your report that are not relevant or aren’t converting, you need to add them to your negative keywords list.

In the same way, you will also want to make a note of all those keywords you delete from your campaign because they are not profitable. Just because you’ve stopped targeting them as exact or phrase match, doesn’t mean that they won’t be picked up again by one of your broad match keywords.

When you delete a keyword from your campaign you should add it to your list of negative keywords.

Always Monitor Your Results

Without a doubt, building a large AdWords negative keywords list for all your campaigns will make your broad match keywords much more targeted and profitable. However, while creating your list, you also need to keep a close eye on how your additions are affecting your conversions.

To avoid loosing money, it is essential that you monitor your conversions using Google Analytics or the much simpler conversions tracking software included within AdWords.

You will then be able to reverse any changes if they have a negative effect on your sales.

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Adrian Key is a professional AdWords consultant and editor of the AdWords Adviser, a blog dedicated to making AdWords more profitable for you. You can get free tips to improve your AdWords advertising at:) http://www.adwords-adviser.co.uk/newsletters/newsletter.html