Some time ago I was looking for ways to send in posts to my WordPress blog via email, and I found a reference to a WordPress plugin called “Postie.” So I popped that into Google search and what did I get?
The correct answer to this search would be the Postie WordPress plugin hosted here. But apparently there is another company named Postie which manages enterprise mail (hosted at postie.com) which is a completely separate entity to the WordPress plugin (hosted at postieplugin.com). As you can see from the screenshot, my search resulted in an ad for the enterprise company.
But I have no interest in enterprise mail. That ad is effectively wasted. Worse yet, the CTR (clickthrough rate, the number of times the ad is clicked on divided by the number of times the ad is shown) of the ad goes down through no fault of the ad itself. But you can see why the ad was shown – the ad’s creator placed ads on the word “postie” and didn’t realize there might be other organizations with the same name.
This is a good example of where negative keywords are used. In short negative keywords are used to find searches to NOT show ads to. In this case, Postie (the enterprise company) should have used negative keywords to exclude the word “plugin” so they’re not confused with Postie Plugin (the WordPress plugin).