What
is Negative Farming technique?

It is a technique used in order to get our ads triggered for every search query with the exact match keywords in the account.

Why do we need Negative farming technique?

If an ad is triggered due to an exact match keyword in the account, it gives a signal to Google ads system that this particular keyword is very relevant. Hence the CTR increases and the CPC goes down. Every other advertiser tries to get maximum traffic through exact match keywords.

When do we need Negative farming technique?

When your client is looking forward to adapt a new technique which can help them reduce the overall cost that keywords incur.

How do we perform Negative Farming?

Step 1: Have your unique set of keywords in an excel file with columns “Campaign”, “Adgroup”,” Keyword”, “Match Type” and “Max CPC”. We will be keeping the Ad group name as per the keyword match type. For example, a keyword +buy +shoes +online will have the ad group name “Shoes – Broad” or a keyword [buy shoes online] will have the ad group name “Shoes – Exact” and similarly for phrase. Campaign name can be of your choice

Step 2 : Take the unique set of keywords and replicate them in Broad, Phrase and Exact. So for example if you have 100 unique set of keywords then in total you will be having 300 keywords (100 for broad, 100 for exact and 100 for phrase) .

Now let us understand the working of negative farming technique. Remember that objective here is that we want exact match type keywords to trigger ads for any relevant search term.

For example:
Search query on Google: buy laptops online
Keywords in the account:

+buy +laptops +online
[buy laptops online] “buy laptops online”

Now you can clearly see that the keywords will start competing with each other in order to trigger the ad and we want only the exact match keyword to trigger the ad. In order to remove broad and phrase match type keywords from competing with the exact match type we will add them as negatives. So here is the rule for “Negative Farming Strategy”

  • Add all phrase match type and exact match type keywords as negatives in Broad match type ad groups. So it means Broad match ad groups will be having positive broad match keywords and same set of keywords will be added as phrase negatives and exact negatives.
  • Do not make any changes in th exact match ad groups.
  • For phrase match ad groups add all keywords as Exact negatives.

This way we eliminated the competition and routed the search term to trigger from the exact match type keywords.

You might think why we need to do this. Can’t we just keep only exact match type keywords in the account and let them trigger the search terms. It’s a good thought but it has one drawback. You will be missing on lot of broad terms that are relevant to the business but are not triggered because you only have exact match type keywords in the account. Hence negative farming plays an important role here. It does not miss on the broad search queries. A broad search query will still be triggered with the broad match type keywords.

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