The Most Common Mistake Photo
Booth Businesses Make With Their
Google Ads

As a photobooth owner, you will likely use or at least, have tried, promoting your business using Google Ads.

And unless you were originally deep into digital marketing or have spent endless hours studying and keeping track of the continual changes Google Ads has introduced over the years, you will no doubt be overwhelmed or extremely frustrated with it.

Having been using Google Ads since its inception I am all too familiar with the speed of change it regularly goes through.

Having started initially promoting photobooth businesses on Google back in 2012, there is still one costly mistake I see booth operators making on a daily basis.

And that mistake is… not using Negative Keywords to stop ads from appearing for irrelevant searches.

An example of this would be your photo booth hire ad appearing for the search term “buy a photo booth” or “photobooth for sale.

Suppose you are running a search campaign with the broad or phrase match keyword of “photo booth” or even “photobooth” and without any negative keywords in place.

In that case, your ad will potentially show for a huge range of searches by people who are not looking to hire a photo booth.

Now you might think that it doesn’t matter as the words in your ad will make it obvious you are not the right fit for the searcher and they won’t click.

That might be true in many cases, but how often have you clicked an irrelevant link in google as it came up top, had a few words relevant to your search, and assumed it must be relevant.

Having landed on the website you immediately realise it is not relevant and clicked straight back to Google Search.

Whilst that may have only cost you a second or two, it could have cost the advertiser £’s. And that may be happening to your ads!

So What Is A Negative Keyword

Essentially it is a word or phrase that you can add to your campaign or adgroup that when included in the users search term will prevent your ad from showing.

So in the above example if your keyword was set to a phrase match of “photo booth” or broad match of “photo booth hire” you could appear for any search terms that include this, such as “hire a photo booth” or  “buy a photo booth”.

Now the first one is great and likely what you were wanting, however, you would not have expected or wanted to appear for the second as this is likely not relevant to your photo booth hire business and if clicked cost you money.

Even if it is not clicked it is still costing you in account quality score, as your Click-Through Rate (CTR) will be lower.

Now whilst the Google AI may eventually figure this out (depending on your campaign type and structure), it will still be costing you unnecessarily, whilst the algorithm learns.

How To Identify Potential Negative Keywords

The best method of identifying potential keywords or phrases to add to your negative keyword list is from the Search Term report in your Google Ads account.

For a search campaign, this can be found as an option in the Keywords section of your campaign as below:

It is good practice to visit this list at least once a month or more often depending on the traffic your ads generate and review the search terms users are typing in before clicking on your ad (and costing you money).

As a photo booth hire company, some of the most common words you may wish to exclude would be:

• used
• 2nd hand
• buy
• for sale
• diy

Depending on your business model you may also want to include words such as cheap, discount etc in your list of negatives. Over time you can build quite a sizable list of negative keywords that all work to improve your Google Ads quality score and ensure you are getting a better return on your overall ad spend.

How To Add Negative Keywords.

At the time of writing and depending on the campaign type you are using, it is possible to add negative keywords either at the Campaign or Adgroup level.

It is also possible to create master negative keyword lists that can be shared across campaigns. So rather than re-invent the wheel – here are a couple of additional resources for you that can be used to follow the adding of either individual negative keywords, or negative keyword lists, step by step.

The Ultimate Negative Keyword Guide by One PPC

Googles Help Pages on Negative Keywords

We hope you have found this article both informative and useful. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to get in touch using the option below: