Google, Yahoo, MSN, along with many other search engines, allow two key components that are crucial to PPC (pay per click) success -- campaign caps and negative keywords.  These two components are not often thought of together but work directly in sync with each other and are complimentary to each other in what they do.  The “cap” and the negative keyword are sister components to any successful PPC campaign.

The campaign cap is simple to understand as it limits how much you can spend on a campaign on any given day or in any given month.  Of course it can be changed if you are on top of it 24/7 but that isn’t always the case.  The cap protects you in many ways such as against click fraud or an unanticipated news story or an unintended meaning of a keyword.  So no matter what occurs, you can only spend up to your cap in a day, thus protecting yourself from a significant loss.  The other side of that is that you can miss out on a big sales day.   What if you are a electronic retailer and Ashton Kutcher Twitters about this great new camera he just bought and you happened to have that on your home page and are running it through your Google Adwords campaign.   That would certainly seem like a huge opportunity missed if your daily cap was very close to your average daily spend.

On the other hand, the cap could protect you against an enormous spend that you can’t take advantage of.  What if you knew that Ashton Kutcher had the camera but it was not released for general sale yet and you could sell it.  Since you are bidding on the word “camera” if someone typed in Ashton Kutchers camera your ad would display.  By quickly putting Ashton Kutcher in the negative keyword list, your ad would not display, thus saving you the spend.

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So how do you keep your eye out for “bad” keywords that you should include in your negative keyword list.  My preference is Google Alerts where you can enter a keyword and Google will notify you anytime there is information on the internet that includes that keyword.  A very useful tool to see who is discussing your topics and what could be construed as a “bad” keyword.

Maintaining an aggressive negative keyword list is crucial to allowing higher caps on campaigns and taking advantage of good news while not getting hurt but unrelated and useless imformation.