Due to the increase in unemployment I have seen an increasing trend in customers accounts. Although many of my clients are not hiring they are receiving traffic from people desperately looking for employment. It seems that this desperation had taken people from searching employment sites such as Monster, Career Builder, etc. to pounding the internet pavement going ”door to door” or “website to website” so to speak. If you are not hiring then it is necessary to add negative keywords to your ad groups to prevent your ads from appearing when people are looking for employment.
Say you are a plumber using broad or phrase match keywords. Your broad match keyword ’plumber’ can allow your ads to appear for ‘plumber jobs’. Your phrase match “Las Vegas plumber” can allow your ads to appear for “Las Vegas plumber jobs”.
To avoid appearing to people looking for jobs add keywords such as -job, -jobs, -employment, -career, -careers. Simply adding a – before a keyword makes it negative. Why pay for people to visit your website looking for employment?
Refer to the following sources for info to identify negative keywords to add to your account.
- search query performance report
- web server logs
- Google Analytics
While the negative keywords will help combat the queries that include ‘jobs’, ‘career’, etc you may still receive traffic from people looking for ‘plumber companies’ without including the keyword job, career, etc. If you still are receiving inquiries for employment then I suggest adding some text to your ads to let people know you are not hiring such as: not hiring, no employment opportunities, no jobs available, etc.
Like you I’m seeing an increasing amount of job searching. Some other keywords to consider are “work” and “opening” which have I seen in phrases like “oracle dba software opening” and “telecom software work”.
Hi!
This is realy helpful advice, every AdWords user have to follow it.
But I’d add that not only in recession period but also in times of wellbeing we have to reduce spending for non relevant visits.
Hi Martin,
Great keyword suggestions. If you were to have the keyword ‘oracle dba software opening’ you would want to add a negative in exact match -[job opening].
Hi Kachko,
Can’t agree more! Most of my clients are small advertisers so I always add these negatives anyway but the increase in unemployment and economic downturn may even force large advertisers to tighten their belts.
Glad you liked the article.
Kim
Hi Kim,
I try and use exact match negatives when I can but mostly my negatives are phrase negatives (I never use broad negatives as I want to know precisely what is ignored). Even if I use a single word negatives I always mark it as a phrase match.
I am lucky that my campaigns are very specific so I can be reasonably confident a phrase negative match of “job” or “opening” will not exclude any matches I wanted.
As an aside, don’t forget that negatives only work in the first 10 words of the search phrase so adding a negative of “job” does not work with the following:
“one two three four five six seven eight nine ten job”
Here are some I’ve seen in the last few days:
xyz jobs
xyz bank jobs
xyz tech support jobs
job in xyz
xyz job in A_PLACE
jobs in xyz
jobs for xyz
opening for xyz
openings in xyz
xyz careers
Martin
This has been driving people in our call center crazy! Doesn’t seem like the best way to get a job. A related issue is we have recently had a lot of companies representing themselves as Google trying to sell their paid search services. This can get confusing when these companies call our clients directly.