Negative Keywords for AdWords That Every Real Estate Investor Needs (2022)

Real estate investor using PPC? This public service announcement about negative keywords is for you:

If you’re running AdWords to generate motivated seller leads, your negative keywords are just as important as your positive ones!

Every Real Estate Investor wants to know “the right keywords to target” in order to bring in more motivated seller leads from Google Ads.

And I get it! Keywords are extremely important. We even did a research project with Investor Carrot that analyzed over 3 million data points, trying to find the Real Estate Investing keywords that produced the most deals.

(If you want to know more about ppc for real estate investors in general, just check out our Ultimate Guide To PPC for Real Estate Investors.)

There’s a problem, though:

Keywords are only part of the story.

Increasingly, Google is pushing more and more investors towards highly-automated, “algorithmic” ad campaigns.

That means that Google exercises more and more control over who sees your campaign and why. 

And while that could be amazing for a different industry, time and again we’ve seen evidence that Google simply doesn’t understand what real estate investors are looking for.

In order to get the most out of Google Adwords moving forward, real estate investors need to sculpt their traffic by making sure they don’t just tell Google who they want to target…

But who they don’t want to target.

That’s where negative keywords come in.

(Just want our list of negative keywords for real estate investors? Click here to skip to the end of the article to grab the list!).

What are negative keywords in Google Ads? Keyword vs. Search Query

In order to understand what negative keywords are, you need to understand a few basic concepts:

Keywords, match types, and search queries.

A keyword is simply a way of telling Google what kind of traffic you want.

Take the keyword sell my house – a CLASSIC! Every real estate investor out there is going to want to target this keyword, since the person searching for this has a house they want to sell. Perfect.

A search query is something a user actually types into Google. This could be anything from pizza place near me to shoes to who was the guy who played Anakin Skywalker? You know, the dude with the hair.

You might think you can just type your keywords into Google Ads and be done with it…but that’s not quite how it works.

See, the thing is – people type all sorts of crazy stuff into Google. It’s very hard – impossible really – to predict all the weird things people are going to be searching for.

If Google only ever showed your ads to people who type in the exact same thing as your keywords, you’d miss out on a lot of potential ad views.

(And Google would miss out on a lot of potential ad revenue, although I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.)

What if someone misspells a term…like typing in “sheo” instead of “shoe”?

What if someone types in “pizza parlor near me”…should none of the “pizza place” ads trigger then?

What if someone types in “Anakin Skywalker guy”? Is that really a completely different search?

Google knows that if it required advertisers to come up with and actively target every single possible search query, most people would miss out on the majority of the traffic available to them. That’s not great for advertisers, and it’s not great for Google.

Keyword Match Types: 3 That Investors Need To Know

To get around this problem, Google uses match types to figure out exactly how much leeway it gets to use when matching your ads to a given search.

There are three basic match types in Google, each of which is identified by it’s punctuation:

[Exact Match] keywords are typed within brackets. Exact Match means that Google has very little leeway in interpreting what we want; when we use this match type, Google should trigger our ads only when someone types in the exact phrase inside the brackets, plus some minor variations.

Example:

[sell my house fast]

….Should only ever trigger if someone searches for:

sell my house fast (or, sell my home fast)

“Phrase Match” keywords are typed in quotation marks. Phrase Matches try to ensure that all the words you place between the quotation marks are present when your ad gets triggered, but allows for additional terms to be added to the beginning, middle, and end.

Example

“sell my house fast”

….Should only ever trigger if someone searches for something like:

sell my house fast in Cleveland, or I need to sell my house fast, or sell my house in grand theft auto V

Broad Match keywords are typed in without any punctuation at all. Broad Matches are more like general topics you want Google AdWords to look for. They can trigger on a variety of different related searches.

Example

sell my house fast

…should trigger on searches like:

sell my house, or Zillow, or home sales near me

How Negative Keywords Work

Regular (or “positive”) keywords ask Google to show our ads when certain searches pop up.

Match types, as explained above, control how much leeway Google has when matching our ads to a given search.

As you can see from some of the examples, though, that’s not always a good thing.

A real estate investor probably WANTS to show up when someone types in sell my house in Cleveland. They probably DON’T want to show up when someone types in sell my house in grand theft auto V.

This is where Negative Keywords save the day.

Negative keywords prevent our ads from showing up when certain words are present. This allows us to selectively remove certain searches we know are bad for business from our accounts, while still retaining the flexibility of the different match types.

Take our example from above. Let’s say I’m targeting “sell my house.” That’s my positive keyword.

This means that people who type in:

But, if someone types in:

“sell my house in grand theft auto”

…Google will detect the phrase “grand theft auto” and not show our ad, saving us some cash.

Pretty cool, huh? Especially in Real Estate Investing, where clicks can be quite expensive, this can have a massive impact on your cost per lead over time.

The Benefits of Negative Keywords

Using negative keywords can have a MASSIVE positive impact on your Google Adwords performance!

Here’s a brief list of just some of the benefits:

• Improved conversion rate (less off-topic clicks means a higher percentage of people convert)
• More qualified leads (just pull in the types of searchers you want)
• More efficiently use your marketing budget (less waste means you can bid more on the searches you want)

How To Add Negative Keywords To Your Google Adwords Account

I did an entire tutorial just on adding negative keywords to you Google Ads Account. Check out the video for the full walk through!

Negative Match Types

Keyword Match Types apply to negative keywords just like they do to positive keywords…so which match types should you use?

Generally, we recommend using phrase match keywords for your negative keywords. This is a good balance between conservatism (removing only the narrowest possible search term, as with an exact match) and efficiency (removing a large variety of off-topic search terms in one fell swoop, as with broad match types).

Broad Match negative keywords can potentially remove A LOT of stuff…and since what doesn’t come into your account is all but invisible to you, there’s a high potential opportunity cost there.

If you’re really worried about removing potentially good variations of a keyword, err on the side of caution and use exact match negative keywords. Otherwise, go with phrase match.

How to find your own negative keywords in Google Ads

While you should definitely use our real estate investing negative keyword list as a starting point, it’s just that: a start.

Your own market will produce lots of local variants that we could never think of ahead of time. That’s why it’s critical to add your own negative keywords to your Google Ads account over time. This will cut wasted spend, allowing you to bid more on the clicks you do want, getting more leads and lowering your cost per deal acquisition.

The best way to do this is by taking a look at your Search Term report. Here’s how to do that:

Inside your Google Ads account, navigate to the left hand side menu and click “Keywords.” Then, click “Search Terms.”

 What you’re looking at are the Search Terms that triggered your account. This is what people are really typing into Google before they see your ads.

An important note about the Search Terms Report: it doesn’t usually show you ALL your data. In fact, let’s take a closer look at the search terms report above:

Here I can see the search terms pictures represent a total of 79 impressions (views of my ads) and 2 clicks.

But the campaign as a whole generated 2,737 impressions and 45 clicks. That means that less than 3% of my total search terms are showing up in this report!

Sadly, this is now the norm. Google has throttled the amount of data that flows into the Search Terms report. And while they later walked that back a bit, increasing data flow, it still represents only a tiny fraction of all the searches your account is triggered by.

Despite this significant drawback, the Search Term report is still great for spotting potential negative keywords.

Look over your search terms report. Ask yourself:

– Do any of these keyword seem off base?

– Are any of these keywords notably wrong or incorrect?

– Are there variations of my keywords that are correct in terms of what I’m targeting, but which I hadn’t expected (like the “grand theft auto” examples above)?

If you find a keyword that seems off base, it’s simple enough to add it to your Negative Keywords right from this screen.

Click the box to the left of a keyword you want to turn into a negative keyword.

Then, at the top of the report, click “Add As Negative Keyword.”

From there, it’s the exact same process as covered in my tutorial above!

How often should you be adding Negative Keywords?

My recommendation is that, if you are in the Real Estate Industry and spending $2,000 a month or less on ads, you should be adding negative keywords about once every 30 days.

If you are spending more than $2,000 a month, it’s probably best to at least look for negative keywords every 14 days or so.

Keep in mind that, as you add more negative keywords, less and less off-topic search queries will come into your account. That means that this process gets easier and quicker over time, so if it seems like a pain early on, don’t give up!

Our Ultimate Real Estate Investors Negative Keyword List

A word of caution: Never, ever, EVER add negative keywords to your account without looking them over first.

Yes, we work with real estate investors around the country every single day; and yes, these are the negative keywords that we use. But that doesn’t mean that they’re automatically right for your business or your market. Please take the time to look these over before adding them to your Google Ads account.

To add these negative keywords to your account at the Campaign Level, click on the campaign you want to edit. Then click Keywords > Negative Keywords and click the Blue “+” button. These keywords, by default, are in the format of Negative Phrase Match Keyword, although you’ll see some Exact Match Keyword in there as well.

(And by the way – if you need help putting together an online marketing plan for YOUR real estate investing business, consider jumping on a call with my team. We’re happy to break down the strategies we’re using to generate motivated seller leads and deals right now, all over the country.)

Happy marketing! 🙂