What is a Negative Keyword: 6 Tips to Effectively Use Negative Keywords in Google Ads

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
• 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!

5 Advantages of Negative Keywords

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. Saves Money – Eliminating useless ad clicks can save money on ad spend.
4. Optimizes Campaign Performance – Using negative keywords in Google Ads refines traffic, which then leads to a more optimized Ads Campaign.
5. 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.

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.