Nearly impossible to use extremely competitive keywords?

There are number of extremely competitive keywords such as

"Hotel"
"Cheap Hotel"
"Mortgage"
"Loan"

Many of advertisers apparently use broad search option, so whenever someone types any of these keywords, these ads show up. This means that these ads effectively raise bidding price of all keywords containing these extremely competitive keywords. So, here's a question. Is it nearly impossible to use extremely competitive keywords in your ad target keywords unless you set your bidding price as high as that for extremely competitive keywords?

Bidding for something like that in a broad keyword is DUMB imo. If at all possible, go for something more targeted. I mean, you don't have a hotel in every city in the world do you? So why would you want the generic word "hotel" vs "atlanta hotel" or "cheap hotel" or something along those lines?

G-Man

That's a good question, but the fact of the matter is that many advertisers do this. So, this effectively raises the bidding price of "atlanta hotel" and "cheap hotel". I'm wondering if there is anything you can do to make your ads visible while you don't set your bidding price so high.

True. You've got to get creative sometimes with adwords and overture. Using negative words in your ad itself sometimes helps so that you get a higher ROI.

I'd recommend checking out Perry Marshall's ebook on adwords. It covers this and a lot of other really indepth adwords topics. I learned quite a bit from it.

G-Man

negative keywords...

Thats actually brilliant, can't believe i never thought about that.

thanks for the tip.

You can watch your referral logs to see which negative keywords you want to ban and combine that with tracking to see which don't convert.

Can someone give me examples of negative keywords and how you can use them?