Yahoo update their negative keyword policy – finally! - Yahoo! Search Marketing

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Yahoo update their negative keyword policy – finally!

April 16th, 2008 by Mike

One of the most important areas in building a pay per click campaign is often neglected by many people. It can really cut down on irrelevant traffic that you're receiving and for those on a limited budget it can really help you maximise your appearance. I'm talking about negative keywords. Adding negative/excluded keywords to your ad group or campaign means that your ads will not show for search queries containing that term. By filtering out these unwanted impressions, negative keywords can help you reach the most qualified users, reduce your CPC's and improve ROI.

This has been one area in pay per click that Yahoo has been seriously behind in compared to Google. Previously, Yahoo had a limit on the number of negative/excluded keywords that you could have contained within an account or at ad group level, which was 50. When you compare this to Google having no limits on place, it's easy to understand the benefits of being able to insert more negatives on the campaign. The more negatives that you have, the less unqualified searches you will be getting. All of this is now ancient history on Yahoo and they have upped their game, the limit is now 250 on the account and at ad group level.

The question does need to be asked, why does Yahoo have a limit on the number of negatives you can have in your pay per click campaign?

There is a cynical theory throughout our office that these limits are in place to help Yahoo achieve a higher number of impressions on advertiser’s campaigns as they are unable to compete with the traffic volumes available on Google.

So why have Yahoo increased the limit for negatives?

In my opinion, Yahoo will have identified that Google’s success has been based on relevancy, this could be seen as there attempt to increase the relevancy of their searches to draw more users into using Yahoo

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