Cleaning Bad Keywords from your AdWords Account
When you bid on keywords using anything apart from exact matches, Google will match search terms with your keywords and sometimes deliver irrelevant traffic to your website. This is especially true with broad match keywords. In Google’s own words, the broad match ‘allows your ad to show for searches on similar phrases and relevant variations‘.
The definition of ‘relevant variations’ is wide and sometimes you can find totally irrelevant traffic in your campaigns. To spot this irrelevant traffic in your campaigns follow the steps below:
Within your campaign, at any level (account level, campaign level or ad group level), click the ‘Keyword’ tab as highlighted below.
In the keyword view, click ‘See search terms …’
You have the option of seeing all search terms for all the keywords selected, or alternatively you can select certain keywords and only see the search terms that triggered those keyword matches.
You can see below search terms that triggered a match on the broad match keyword ‘link building’.
In order to remove this bad traffic, use negative match keywords at ad group of campaign level, or remove the broad match and narrow the scope using exact or phrase matches.