Mastering Negative Keywords and Ad Targeting

Negative keywords serve as the gatekeepers of your ad campaigns, allowing you to refine your targeting and ensure your ads are displayed to the most relevant audience. In this article, you will learn in detail about:

• What negative keywords are
• The advantages of using negative keywords
• Negative keyword match types
• How to find negative keywords, and
• Strategies to maximize benefits from the use of negative keywords

Whether you’re new to search advertising or seeking to optimize your existing campaigns, understanding negative keywords is essential for maximizing your ROI and achieving your advertising goals.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are diagonal opposites of standard keywords. They serve as a critical component in digital advertising campaigns across various platforms, including Google and Microsoft Advertising. Negative keywords are defined as “keywords that prevent your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase”.

In other words, a standard keyword says “Show my ads to people searching this” while a negative keyword says “Do not show my ads to people searching this”.

Every click matters in an ad campaign. You only want relevant people to see your ads and reach your landing page. Using a comprehensive negative keyword list narrows down your target audience ensuring that your clicks are not wasted on irrelevant searches, thus positively impacting your CTR and conversion rates.

For instance, if you are advertising for a travel agency specializing in luxury vacations, you will want to target ‘luxury travel’ and ‘luxury vacations’. At the same time, you want to avoid people searching for ‘budget travel deals’ or ‘cheap vacation packages’.

Neither of these searches aligns with the target audience for luxury vacations. Hence, it is better to exclude them.

How to Evaluate Search Terms to Find Negative Keywords

You can find negative keywords based on irrelevance and potential waste of clicks. As these keywords are meant to exclude search terms from your campaigns, you’ll need to evaluate them for different scenarios.

You can estimate whether a Search Term should be negative or not by asking the following questions:

• Would a person searching this click on my ad?
• What would happen after the person searching this clicks on my ad?
• Does this search intent match my target audience?
• Can I expect a conversion from this search term?
• What will I miss if the person searching for this does not see my ad?

These questions will help you assess the potential value of each search term and identify negative keywords.

How Do Negative Keyword Match Types Work?

Negative keyword match types work similarly to regular keyword match types but in reverse, allowing you to control which search terms your ads are not shown for. There are three main types of negative keyword match types: broad, phrase, and exact.

The following table gives you an idea of how each of the match types functions for the keyword ‘free shipping’.

Broad Match Negative Keywords

Broad match negative keywords prevent your ads from showing for any search term that contains the keywords in any order, along with any additional words.

For example, if you add the negative keyword ‘free shipping’, your ads will not be shown for searches like ‘free shipping options’, ‘shipping services with free returns’, or ‘free express shipping’. This match type provides the broadest coverage but may also exclude some relevant searches.

Phrase Match Negative Keywords

Phrase match negative keywords prevent your ads from showing only when the search term contains the exact keyword phrase, along with any additional words before or after it.

For example, if you add the negative keyword ‘fast delivery’, your ads will not be shown for searches like ‘get fast delivery’, ‘fast delivery options’, or ‘fast delivery near me’. However, they may still appear for searches like ‘delivery services with fast and reliable shipping’.

Exact Match Negative Keywords

Exact match negative keywords prevent your ads from showing only for the exact keyword phrase specified, without any additional words before, after, or in between. For example, if you add the negative keyword ‘overnight delivery’, your ads will not be shown for searches like ‘overnight delivery services’, ‘overnight delivery tracking’, or ‘fast overnight delivery’, ensuring that your ads are not displayed for any variation of the specified phrase.

Using negative keyword match types effectively requires understanding the nuances of each match type and selecting the most appropriate option based on your advertising goals and target audience. Additionally, regularly reviewing and updating your negative keyword lists to reflect changes in search behavior and campaign performance is essential for optimizing the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.

How to Add Negative Keywords To Your Campaigns

Account-Level Negative Keywords

These negative keywords apply to all campaigns within the entire ad account. They are useful for excluding broad topics or terms you never want to target, regardless of the campaign. For an ecommerce business, for example, account-wide negatives can include keywords like ‘free’, ‘second hand’, ‘jobs’, ‘make your own’, ‘shops near me’, ‘address’ ‘contact number’, etc.

These keywords indicate search intents that are irrelevant to your ad and can include job searches, mistaken searches, address searches, brand-specific searches, etc.

Building a list of account-wide negatives will save you a lot of time and money. The benefits of this function will amplify with each addition to the list.

Campaign-Level Negative Keywords

Campaign-level negative keywords apply only to the specific campaign they are added to.

If you implement a list of negative keywords at the campaign level, you are telling the ad platform that you do not want to show ads to anyone searching for these keywords in the entire campaign. These negative keywords will apply to all ad groups within the campaign.

They allow advertisers to tailor their exclusions to the theme or focus of each campaign. For example, a campaign promoting luxury watches may exclude terms related to inexpensive or budget watches.

Ad Group-Level Negative Keywords

Ad group-level negative keywords apply only to the ad group they are added to, providing even more granular control. Advertisers can use ad group-level negative keywords to further refine targeting within a campaign.

For instance, within a campaign promoting men’s clothing, an ad group focusing on suits may exclude terms related to casual wear.

You can also use negative keywords to ensure that different ad groups don’t overlap. You can use targeted keywords from one group as negative keywords for another to avoid wasting multiple ads on a single search.

How to Use the Search Terms Report to Find Negative Keywords

In both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, the search terms report is a valuable tool for identifying relevant search queries that trigger your ads. By analyzing this report, you can uncover potential negative keywords to add to your campaigns.

Here’s how users can find and add negative keywords using the search terms report:

Step 1: Access the Search Terms Report.

Navigate to the ‘Keywords’ tab in Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising editor and select ‘Search terms’. This report shows the actual search terms that triggered your ads.

Step 2: Review Search Terms.

Analyze the search terms listed in the report to identify any irrelevant or unrelated queries that triggered your ads. Look for terms that are not aligned with your campaign objectives or target audience.

Step 3: Identify Negative Keywords.

Identify search terms that are not relevant to your products, services, or target audience. These may include terms indicating a different intent, misspellings, irrelevant variations, or terms leading to irrelevant traffic.

Look for terms with low conversion rates, high bounce rates, or low engagement metrics, as these may indicate mismatches between the search query and your ad offering.

Step 4: Add Negative Keywords

Once you’ve identified potential negative keywords, add them to your campaigns or ad groups to prevent your ads from appearing for these terms in the future.

Navigate to the ‘Keywords’ tab and select ‘Negative keywords’. Click the blue plus button or ‘Add negative keywords’ to add negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level.

Step 5: Monitor Performance

By strategically adding negative keywords at different levels, you can fine-tune your targeting.

Additionally, do a regular review and update negative keyword lists based on performance data and changes in campaign objectives to maintain optimal targeting. Track metrics such as CTR, conversion rate, and ROI to ensure that the exclusion of certain search terms improves campaign performance.

Tips to Find Effective Negative Keywords

• Adam Gorecki from Intigress says, “If you don’t have time to review all of the search terms, you might find some luck reviewing the top search terms ordered from most impressions to least.”
• Review search terms with the most cost, then with the most clicks.
• Ignore anything with only 1 impression or zero clicks to save more time.
• Build lists that are compatible with both Google and Microsoft Ads. Since the latter does not support broad match negatives, you could build a list of single-word phrase match negatives and use it on both platforms.
• If you’re using any broad or phrase match keywords, it is likely that some search queries will match to less relevant keywords and show a less relevant ad. Consider finding and using some search terms as exact match negative keywords at the ad group level, ensuring the right ads show for each search query in the account. You can do this using the Traffic Sculptor.
• Driva, a fintech based in Australia improved their PPC performance substantially by using Optmyzr tools like the Negative Keyword Finder to find and eliminate non-performing keywords. You can also find negative keywords for both, search and social using Optmyzr tools.

Here Are Some Negative Keyword Strategies We’ve Seen Many Experts Using in Their Campaigns

These strategies come from seasoned PPC experts and regular practitioners like Navah Hopkins, Duane Brown, Melissa Mackey, and Nicholas Woodward.

Use Match Types Effectively

Merely knowing match types might not be enough. Navah Hopkins points out that negative keywords do not account for close variants.

For instance, you add ‘cheap’ as a negative keyword to prevent your luxury hotel ads from showing for budget-related searches. If you use ‘cheap" as a phrase match or broad match negative keyword, it will block any search query containing the word ‘cheap’ along with additional words before or after it. This ensures that your ads won’t appear for terms like ‘cheap luxury hotel" or ’luxury hotel deals cheap’.

On the other hand, if you set ‘cheap’ as an exact match negative keyword, it will only exclude search queries that exactly match the word ‘cheap’ without any additional words. While this protects against direct mentions of ‘cheap’, it may still allow variations like ‘affordable luxury hotel’ to trigger your ads. Therefore, understanding the nuances of negative keyword match types is crucial for effective ad targeting and campaign optimization.

Look Beyond the Search Terms Report

Duane Brown from Take Some Risk Inc. offers insightful advice on expanding negative keyword strategies beyond the conventional Search Term report. He suggests “using synonym finder tools to identify closely related terms to add to your negative keyword lists”.

Additionally, GPT can be used to rank search terms by relevance. You can save a lot of time by using GPT’s AI to easily score long lists of search terms and find the ones with the lowest relevance for your business.

Exclude Irrelevant Keywords Based on Current Events

Nicholas Woodward from Pack and Send says, “Major events, shocking news, and viral content can disrupt a search campaign like an earthquake. Take preemptive measures to ensure that current events or a sudden rise in related searches do not affect your campaign.”

For example, you’re running ads for ‘banana milkshake’. Meanwhile, some celebrity spills a banana milkshake on their dress and this incident goes viral in the news. Your ad campaign could experience unexpected fluctuations.

As your campaign is targeting the words ‘banana milkshake’, people searching for the celebrity mishap will also see your ad. Negative keywords can help you exclude all people searching for the celebrity.

Avoid Competing With Your Own Ads

If you’re planning to run Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) you might want to consider adding your active keywords as negatives in those campaigns. Many PPC experts including Navah have observed that despite Google’s stance that DSA campaigns won’t compete with keywords and ads from Standard campaigns, the results were much better when the two were not mixed and when negatives were used.

Leverage Negative Keyword Lists

Despite their potential, negative keyword lists are often underutilized. Melissa Mackey says, “Every ads account should use negative keyword lists. Advertisers should have lists at least for Universal Negatives, Brand terms to negate from non-brand campaigns, and Competitor Negatives.” There might be a 20-list constraint, but they serve as valuable tools for managing extensive themed lists and maintaining campaign precision.

Additionally, Duane recommends building strong negative keyword lists to exclude irrelevant searches effectively- “Most brands can also look at building a source of truth negative keyword list and making sure they don’t show up for jobs, YouTube, video game and other odd searches.”

What Are the Advantages of Using Negative Keywords?

Refined Targeting

Negative keywords allow you to refine your targeting by excluding searches that are not relevant to your business or offering. This helps you focus your advertising efforts on reaching the most qualified audience for your products or services.

Improved Quality Score

By excluding irrelevant searches, your ads become more targeted, leading to higher click-through rates (CTRs) and improved ad relevance. This can, in turn, positively impact your Quality Score, resulting in better ad positions.

Relevant Ads That Convert Better

Negative keywords help ensure that your ads are shown to users who are more likely to be interested in your offering. By filtering out irrelevant traffic, you increase the chances of reaching potential customers who are more likely to convert, leading to higher conversion rates and a better ROI.

Money Saved on CPCs

Google’s control over ad auction pricing and changes in minimum bids are causing CPCs to rise year after year, and you should do what you can to safeguard your PPC campaigns against increasing costs.

One of the simplest ways to do that is by excluding irrelevant searches, in other words, by using negative keywords to prevent your ads from being triggered by users who are unlikely to convert. This helps you avoid wasting your budget on clicks that are unlikely to result in a desired action, ultimately saving you money on CPCs and improving the overall ROI of your ad campaigns.

Find the Positive Impact of Negative Keywords

Finding negative keywords will always be a work in progress. The more campaigns you run, the more negative keywords you will discover, and each negative keyword helps you filter out people you don’t want. But it is important to strike a balance. If you have too many negative keywords, you might also filter out potential customers. Target keywords and negative keywords work like yin-yang. They are opposites, yet they function harmoniously.

With the right tools and strategies, you can navigate this delicate balance efficiently. Take control of your keyword management and overall account health with Optmyzr’s suite of solutions. Sign up for a 14-day free trial.