When it comes to Google Ads, effective paid search management is essential. Negative keywords help you fine-tune the keywords in your campaign to maximize ad relevance, fully optimize your ad, and therefore, boost your return on investment (ROI).

1. What is Negative
Keyword in
Adwords
When it comes to Google Ads, Negative keywords
help you fine-tune the keywords in your campaign
to maximize ad relevance, fully optimize your ad,
and therefore, boost your return on investment (ROI).
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Effective Use of Negative Keywords in Google Ads Campaigns
You can look at negative keywords as a filter that stops your ad being triggered by irrelevant search queries.
This ensures your ads reach the most relevant audience for your products or services.
Similar to bidding on keywords, you can select negative keywords in your account, at the ad group or campaign
level. In this article, we’ll outline everything you need to know to use negative keywords in Ads – effectively.

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6 Tips to Effectively Use Negative Keywords
Using negative keywords is crucial to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising success, as it offers marketers a powerful
way of refining their traffic, which optimizes the campaign budget.
Here are some top tips to consider while adding negative keywords to your campaign.
1. Avoid List Stuffing
2. Check Existing Negatives
3. Irrelevant vs. Non-Converting Keywords
4. Use Your Negative Keywords Strategically
5. Match Type Intelligence
6. Use Enough Data

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6 Tips to Effectively Use Negative Keywords
1. Avoid List Stuffing
This is most pertinent for larger accounts where bulk negative keyword uploads are commonplace. Adding all
your negative keywords in one shot, or ‘list stuffing’ in your campaign can do more harm than good. This can
cause an increase in lost impression shares.
Instead, gradually increase your lists so that you can gain proper performance control over your ads.

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6 Tips to Effectively Use Negative Keywords
2. Check Existing Negatives
It’s a good habit to periodically review your existing negative keyword lists to check that you’re not blocking
relevant traffic. By continually monitoring ad performance, you can avoid this problem, ensuring you don’t
discount any valuable keywords – and therefore potential customers.
Merely checking your existing negatives is one of the most straightforward ways to understand why you could
be losing out on impressions.

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6 Tips to Effectively Use Negative Keywords
3. Irrelevant vs. Non-Converting Keywords
There is a difference between irrelevant and non-converting keywords. While some keywords in your negative
list may be totally unrelated to what you’re offering, other times, you may be adding keywords to that list
because they don’t generate a significant amount of conversions for your campaign.
This low conversion rate can be for several reasons, including your budget allocation or because your ad copy
isn’t optimized to rival the competition. Make sure your budget and ad copy are on-point, or you may
accidentally add valuable keywords to your negative list.

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6 Tips to Effectively Use Negative Keywords
4. Use Your Negative Keywords Strategically
Make sure you use your negative keywords to bring people to the proper page on your site. Create specific ad
grounds for your different products. Use your negative keywords in all of your campaigns to avoid overlap, inner
competition, and irrelevancy.
5. Match Type Intelligence
Negative keywords, like regular keywords, have match types. Knowing when to use exact match type negative
keywords or broad match types is important, as it helps you improve your traffic quality even further.

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6 Tips to Effectively Use Negative Keywords
6. Use Enough Data
It’s essential to avoid adding keywords just because they haven’t converted for you – yet.
To avoid this, you can run your campaigns for a long enough period to gather sufficient performance data for
each search query on your account. Do your research before declaring a keyword as negative.

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How to Add Negative Keywords in Ads
Find the “keywords” section in your Google Ads account to begin adding negative keywords.
This page will show the list of keywords you’re currently bidding for in your campaign. However, it doesn’t
display the queries which triggered these keywords. To see this, click on the button, “Search Terms.”
On this page, you’ll see the following options:
Search Term – To see the queries that were used by Google users. These are what triggered your ads, based
on the keywords you’re bidding for.
Match Type – This will display the match type of the user search queries, which indicates how much control
you have over the keywords in your campaign.

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How to Add Negative Keywords in Ads
Added / Excluded – This displays the action you have taken on a specific search query.
To include negative keywords to your list, first, select the search term that you want to add. Once you’ve chosen
this term, you’ll see a box open up, showing, “Add as a negative keyword.”
It will then ask you to choose the keyword’s level of assignment along with the match type. Once you’ve defined
this information, click “save” and you’re done!

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5 Advantages of Negative Keywords
Improved Clickthrough Rate – Using negative keywords ensures your ads aren’t triggering irrelevant
queries, and therefore, attracting irrelevant traffic. This then leads to an improved clickthrough rate (CTR).
Creates More Relevant Ad Groups – Filtering out irrelevant keywords helps create a more relevant ad
group, which then allows you to craft messages which speak directly to your target customers.
Saves Money – Eliminating useless ad clicks can save money on ad spend.
Optimizes Campaign Performance – Using negative keywords in Google Ads refines traffic, which then
leads to a more optimized Ads Campaign.
Boosts Conversion Rates – Using negatives will also ensure that your ads aren’t displayed for terms that
won’t lead to conversions. Eventually, this will help boost your conversion rates.

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Wrap Up
As you can see, negative keywords are just as important as general keywords for your campaign success. These
keywords help optimize your ads, ensuring you don’t show them to the wrong audience. Soon enough, you can
display your ads to the right audience, while also reducing your ad costs, and boosting your quality score, CTR,
and conversion rate.
By using a combination of exact match, phrase, and broad match negative keywords, you’ll be able to fully
optimize your ads to get ahead of your competition – and stay ahead.

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