How Negative Keywords Can Help Your Google Ads Performance

Any advertiser using search engine ads should be utilizing negative keywords in their Pay Per Click campaigns. Negative keywords are words or phrases that you do not want the search engine to associate with your brand or ads and can ultimately end up saving you from unnecessary budget spend.

Negative keywords are often overlooked as an important resource in an advertiser’s campaign strategy. By using this setting in AdWords, it allows you to exclude these similar but unrelated keywords from triggering the search engine to show your particular ad.

For example, you are setting up your ad campaign to help sell your product of beer glasses and you set up a broad search. The main keywords you would like to show up in would be beer or beer glasses, however, this can be problematic as several things can happen:

• Since your keywords are broad, you’re telling the search engine that you want anything to do with “beer” and “glasses”
• A searcher types in just the word “glasses” but is looking for a new pair of prescription glasses, your ad for beer glasses shows up next to a company that sells eyeglasses
• The searcher may accidentally click on your ad, charging you for that click even though there is no intent to purchase your product because it was not what they were looking for

Negative keywords help to keep your budget costs going to the keywords you want to target. Not only do they benefit you by saving money on wasted clicks, but it also improves the click-through rate (CTR) of your ads, which helps improve your ad quality scores in the search engine. Improving the quality score can help with bidding strategies by allowing you to bid less than a competitor, overall helping you to maintain a higher ad position on a search results page.

Negative Keyword Notations

Just as you would a normal keyword, you can also create and apply negative keywords to your campaign. Below are the notations: 

• Exact match: [brackets]
• Phrase match: “quotations”
• Modified broad match: +word +word
• no notation at all indicates standard broad match

When listing your negative keywords, the notation you use will depend on what you want that negative keyword to accomplish. Do you not want any searches that only include the word “glasses” or do you want to be more specific and not target searches that say +eye +glasses in any order. It is important to known what you want when applying these negative keywords to your PPC campaign.

Below is a compiled list of negative keywords that may or may not work for what you’re trying to achieve. They are organized by category so you can decide if they are a good fit to exclude from your AdWords campaigns.

Related: How to Accept a Facebook Page Admin Invite.