Please Pass The Turkey, Hold The Gravy. And The Costumes and the Real Estate and…

November 25, 2008 |

IT’S THAT TIME of year again. Time to be thankful for things like the ususal family, friends, loved ones and health. And the unique like TastyKakes, McSweeney’s, the Clash, Adam Figueira, kitten pants, and the Bird Machine. In my family it also means the start of 6 weeks of spending A LOT of time with each other - besides Thanksgiving day we also have 4 birthday’s in December and Christmas - the other consumptive holiday.

With Thanksgiving day coming up this Thursday followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday it is a crazy short week for a paid search marketer. By now hopefully you’ve planned a head, built out holiday specific campaigns, worked out holiday ad creative messaging & differentiating offers with your client and made the necessary arrangements to be ‘on call’ during the long weekend.

As you are running around checking your paid search to-do list and checking it twice - DON’T FORGET ABOUT ADDING NEGATIVE KEYWORDS to your new campaigns and ad groups. Negatives can be a tricky keyword type to work with and an art I am still trying to master. So it also seems for those bidding on the keyword ‘turkey’ as shown here as an example. There are pages of sponsored link results on Google and this example shows the variety of ‘turkey’ related things one might be interested in including travel, real estate, recipes, the country, costumes and, oh yeah, THANKSGIVING!

If you are bidding on ’turkey’ related keywords and you are not using negative keywords be prepared to see a spike in impressions and lower click thru rate than usual. Not that it’s wrong to ride out this week in this way, but you might want to consider implementing a set of negative keywords just for this short period of time.

To learn more about negative keywords for this week and beyond please visit the following links:

Google AdWords Negative Keyword Guide

Komarketing B2B Negative Keyword Guide

Negative Keyword Research Tools & Tips