Every morning my routine includes checking Gaug.es and Google Analytics for our websites and optimizing our AdWords campaigns for our cron monitoring tool, Dead Man’s Snitch.

We know the name is a bit edgy but we stuck with it and gave it a personality. Read more about the design and branding here. As with any AdWords campaign, edgy names or not, adding negative keywords plays a large role in helping avoid misleading visitors to your website. A negative keyword prevents your ads from showing in certain keyword searches.

Thanks to my new Google Analytics SEO Dashboard, I found some interesting negative keyword combinations:

Not only did these keywords give everyone a nice laugh, but they acted as a subtle reminder of the importance of negative keyword. These visits didn’t cost anything since they weren’t click-throughs from my AdWords ads, but it easily could have.

For some, the idea of avoiding potential visitors from landing on your website may seem foreign. This is where quality visits trump quantity especially in your campaigns. The end goal is high quality (highly targeted) visitors more-so than quantity of visits. That is, unless you don’t have a budget, then go wild! Google will love you for it.

Here is a great example. Searching for “animal health insurance” shows an ad from healthcare.gov.

Not adding negative keywords can be a costly mistake. You won’t get all of them the first time, just make sure to add it to your campaign optimization checklist. If you’re interested in reading more about negative keywords and extra tools to help you, check out David Melamed’s blogpost, Two Negative Keyword Tools I Can’t Live Without.

Happy optimizing!