Why? Because being negative can help you find irrelevant traffic before it finds you. When managing your PPC accounts, one thing you must regularly do is run search query reports in Adwords and Bing Ads to uncover all queries that are resulting in unqualified impressions or clicks, and add those in as negatives.

Doing this can really help narrow down your keyword list and prevent unqualified traffic from seeing your ad and not clicking – which prevents your impressions from skyrocketing and therefore lowering your click-through rate. But negatives also can prevent people from clicking on your ads, costing you money and lowering your conversion rates.

However, if you’re only relying on the search query reports you’re really only being reactive in preventing your ad from being shown and clicked on by irrelevant traffic.

Before you even start a PPC account, you should be running basic keyword research reports to find potential keywords that could cause irrelevant traffic to see your ads and/or click on them. This is a more proactive approach in keeping unqualified traffic out and therefore increasing click-through rates and quality scores. For example, you could be doing PPC keyword research on ‘barbecue grills” but find keywords that have search volume for, ‘Bentley grills,’ or ‘barbecue recipes.’ At this point you would want to add in ‘Bentley’ and ‘recipes’ to your negative keyword list to weed out that irrelevant/unqualified traffic.

Really, the search query reports are for finding negatives that you miss from your initial keyword research. When explored on a regular basis, you can get into the minds of searchers and find those negatives before they find, and cost you!