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The great W.C. Fields left the world many hilarious one-liners. His cynical view on life and stinging sarcasm was way ahead of his time and his influence can be seen in comedians as diverse as Don Rickles all the way through to Kathy Griffin today. Unfortunately, it appears that poor W.C. is all but forgotten today.

I’m sure Mr. Fields wouldn’t be too bothered by that and most likely would have another great one-liner at hand to brush it off with.

W.C. was famous for not being all that fond of children and animals and expressed that by remarking in one of his films:

“Anyone who doesn’t like children or animals can’t be all bad.”

Whether he truly held that conviction I don’t know, but it sure doesn’t go over well with most people. However, I’m finding that those are very wise words to live by when setting up a negative keyword list for PPC campaigns.

As most PPC affiliates who have been at the game for any length of time realize is that if you don’t have a comprehensive list of negative keywords for your campaigns, then you’re burning up money. In some cases, it can add up to a lot of money and with the ever escalating costs of click prices, especially on Adwords, it’s nothing to sneeze at.

The first place to start gathering candidates to add to your negative keyword list is when you start collecting keywords for your PPC campaigns. The Google External Keyword Tool is a popular place to begin. A quick scan of the keyword results will often reveal either totally unrelated keywords for the search or keywords that have a low potential for converting into sales or actions.

The other place to harvest negative keywords from is your server logs and Web analytics scripts.

I like to go through these logs often after just launching a PPC campaign to see which search queries are triggering my ads and also where my ads are truly ranking in Adwords. Sometimes what Google reports and what is actually the case aren’t always in alignment.

One effect that I’ve noticed with a high degree of regularity in health-related niches is that most ailments and conditions not only affect adults (people with credit cards), but also children and animals.

In most all cases, I only want my ads shown to adult humans - the people with both the means and the inclination to purchase the product I’m offering. It’s true that adults also search for information on medical conditions affecting their children, but my hunch is they’re less likely to purchase an eBook on the subject than if it’s a condition they’re personally suffering from.

And of course, if I’m promoting an eBook on stopping hair loss, I don’t want my ads shown to someone looking to stop hair loss in thier golden retriever or pony. I know it seems strange, but I’ve seen enough of these searches to know that it happens more often than you’d think. That’s why running an analytics script on your landing pages is a good idea.

I used to use SiteMeter, but learned that they drop a third-party cookie in users’ browsers, which isn’t cool. I’m now using StatCounter, which I like much better. StatCounter provides a nice summary of keyword analysis data. This data can also be used to scale up a campaign by mining for both lateral and longtail keywords.

So no offense to kids and animals - they’re both what makes this world a happier place, but stay the heck out of my PPC campaigns thank you.