The Importance Of Negative Keywords

Find & Use Negative Keywords

When people talk about keywords in Google Ads, it is almost always about ‘positive’ keywords and match types. However, a little discussed topic is negative keywords!

What Is A Negative Keyword?

A negative keyword is a keyword that you place in your Adwords system that prevents your ad from showing up for irrelevant search phrases. This can be crucial in getting the most out of your budget.

For instance, if your website provides ‘eye glasses‘, Google searches that you could be competing for would include ‘wine glasses‘ or ‘drinking glasses.’

However, the clicks generated on your site are likely worthless, as these visitors are highly unlikely to be interested in your eyeglasses when searching for drinking glasses

This tool can prevent these searches from showing your ad, increasing your ROI (return on investment) by only showing your ad to the most relevant searches.

How To Discover Negatives

Plenty of places across the internet can help you find the best positive and negative keywords for your campaigns. However, we find the best place to find both positive AND negative is in the searches your site has actually been for!

In your campaign, clicking on the Keywords tab will show three different options: ‘Search Keywords, ‘ ‘Negative Keywords’, & ‘Search Terms’.

‘Search keywords’ are the keywords you have selected to be competitive.

‘Negative keywords’ are the words that you have already selected as negative.

‘Search Terms’ are people’s words to trigger your advert.

All you have to do is go down the Search Terms list, tick the search term you would like to add as a negative, scroll to the top of the list and select ‘add as the negative keyword’. You can do the same to find other positive keywords using the same technique; only click ‘Add as keyword’ rather than ‘Add as negative keyword’.

These keywords can be added at different levels on your Adwords account, which is useful when structuring your Adwords set-up. We have listed the different levels underneath.

Negative Keyword List

As the title would suggest, this is a list of negative keywords. Once you have created a list – by going to ‘Shared Library > Negative Keyword Lists’ and creating a new list, you can assign that list to the different Campaigns that have been set up.

Keywords in a negative list will usually be quite generic, so they will be relevant to all the campaigns set up. These could be negative keywords such as -Free, -Advice, -International etc. Any search type that you wouldn’t want to pay to appear for.

Campaign level negative keywords

These should be campaign-wide searches. For instance, if you have one campaign that sells red hats and another campaign that sells blue hats, you may want to add ‘blue hats’ as a negative keyword in the red hats campaign and vice versa.

‘Blue hats’ as a negative in a keyword list wouldn’t work, as this will be across all campaigns and would block searches for Blue hats in the Blue hats campaign.

When you add these keywords, you get offered a choice of where you would like to place the negative keyword. Click it in the Campaign level as shown in the image underneath, if you are confident that is where it should go.

Ad group level negative keywords

Negative keywords at the ad group level give an even greater level of control over the searches that your ad will appear for.

Sticking with the Blue hats campaign example, imagine there are two different ad groups – blue baseball hats and blue top hats. You wouldn’t want people searching for Blue baseball hats to be shown an advert for Blue top hats as that is not what they are looking for.

While adding negative keywords, be sure that you don’t accidentally prevent your website from appearing for actual searches that generate traffic.

The same rules apply to negative keywords as to positive ones, with broad match, +broad match modifier “phrase match,” and being applied for extra control of your negative keywords.

For more control over your Adwords budget, look at our linked article.

If you would like a review of your Adwords account, get in touch with Interact-IT today. We have over 20 years of experience dealing with Pay per click advertising systems, so we are in a perfect position to provide solutions that get results.