MARKETING
Negative Keywords: How to Use Them and Why They’re Important
Chances are that if you’re reading this blog post right now, you’re at least familiar with the fundamentals of PPC. If not, check out this awesome blog post to get a basic understanding of Pay Per Click advertising.
In case you need a quick recap on how keywords play a role in PPC, I will cover that first. With Pay Per Click, the idea is to bid on keywords that are related to the products you are advertising. For example, if you are selling running shoes, you would bid on the keywords “running shoes” so that when someone searched those terms, your ad would show. I’m sure by now you’re thinking “if keywords are the way to get your ads to show, why on h*cken earth would I want to have negatives?”. Glad you asked.
You can only get so granular with your keywords, and it is inevitable that your ads will show for searches that aren’t related to what you are advertising. The problem with this is that it costs money to show your ads, so what do you do to prevent your ads from showing for these searches? This is where negatives come into play. Negative keywords are the keywords you add into your account that you don’t want your ads to show for. There are a few different ways to find negatives, and there are also a few different ways to exclude them, so let’s cover both.
Finding Negatives
When you are looking for negatives to exclude in your account, sometimes the terms you don’t want to show for will be obvious, but sometimes you will have to do a little research. One place to start is the Keyword Planner in Google. While usually the keyword planner is used to get search volume forecasts of keywords you might want to add to your account, you can also find searches that you don’t want to show for. For example, if you were bidding on the term “dentures” for a company in the dentistry industry, you would put that into the keyword planner and see the different terms that are being searched related to dentures.
Another way to find potential negatives is to do an SQR, or a Search Query Report. With this, you can see the actual things people are searching, and this will give you an insight into terms that you don’t want to show for.
Different Ways to Exclude
After you have found the terms that you want to exclude from your account, you have to decide how you want to exclude them. The first choice you have is which match type you want to exclude as. If you want to exclude just one term completely, you can exclude it as an exact match. If you want to exclude a term only in certain context, then you can exclude it as phrase match. If you want to exclude a certain term in any context with any combination of words, then you would choose broad match. Although you can create broad match negatives, it is best practice to keep your negatives tight and succinct. You wouldn’t want to create an exclusion that tanks traffic because of the broad connections associated with it.
The next choice you have is to either exclude the keyword at ad group level, campaign level, or by using a negative keyword list. Just like they sound, excluding at the ad group and campaign level is just that, excluding those terms from only certain ad groups and campaigns. With a negative keyword list, you are excluding these terms from the whole account, so they will never trigger your ad to show.
Extra Tips
Now that you know how to find negatives, and also how to exclude them, let’s go through some best practices for using them.
- If you are running both brand and non-brand campaigns, you will want to have your branded terms as negatives in your non-brand campaign. This will make sure that your campaigns aren’t competing against each other and will force your branded terms to go to your branded campaign. This makes it easier to identify performance for both brand and non-brand.
- If you split your campaigns or ad groups up by match type, you will want to have your exact terms as negatives in your phrase or broad campaigns. For the same reasons as above, this will eliminate the chance of your terms competing with each other
Negatives can save you time and money, so make sure to implement them in your accounts!
MARKETING
Trends in Content Localization – Moz
Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.
Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.
Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.
MARKETING
How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy
MARKETING
More promotions and more layoffs
For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.
The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.
Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes
Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643.
Here are the median salaries by role:
- Senior management $199,653
- Director $157,776
- Manager $99,510
- Staff $89,126
Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.
One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%).
Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.
Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams
Employee turnover
In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”
Men and Women
This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.
In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.
Methodology
The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents.
Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.
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