It's not uncommon for multifamily operators to wonder why they aren't seeing their apartment pay per click ads when they complete a Google search. This conversation often leads to multifamily marketing agencies providing the list of keywords your pay per click strategy is bidding on to assess performance and strategy. While keyword lists help provide an abundance of information and insight into your campaigns, they often times only tell part of the story.
Enter negative keywords. While infrequently discussed in pay per click/search engine marketing conversations, negative keywords are instrumental to optimizing a successful PPC strategy. Take this example: You are operating a high rise apartment in Uptown Dallas with 1 bedroom apartments that start at $2,000/month. Given your location, you see +apartments +uptown +dallas in
your keyword list for your pay per click strategy. While this is an appropriate keyword to bid on for this community, if not monitored correctly with appropriate management and negative keywords, your strategy can lead to clicks associated with search queries like "apartments in uptown dallas under $600" or "cheap apartments uptown dallas." Google correctly recognizes these searches as being consistent with the terms you want to bid on- apartments, uptown, dallas. By not including "under $600" or "cheap" in your negative keyword list, however, you end up showing your ads to prospects who are not able or who are not interested in living in a community at your price range. It's incredibly important when reviewing your multifamily search engine marketing strategy and performance to make sure you keep a close eye on your negative keywords and the search queries that have generated your ads. This can help create some great opportunities to increase performance and to drive qualified traffic to your apartment community website.