What Are Negative Keywords and When Should You Use Them?

Are you tired of your online ads being triggered by irrelevant keywords? Enter the negative keyword. You can avoid appearing in unrelated searches by specifying certain words or phrases you don’t want to be associated with your ad.

For example, if you sell shoes, you might want to add “free” as a negative keyword to avoid paying for clicks from people who are not interested in buying. This saves you money and ensures that your ad is being shown to people who are interested in what you’re offering.

Many businesses overlook this simple strategy and waste money on low-quality traffic. Using negative keywords in your Google Ads campaign can boost your ROI and save money on ad spend.

Unlike regular keywords that trigger your ads for relevant searches, negative keywords prevent your ads from showing up for sea; this strategy allows you to filter out searches unrelated to your products or services and avoid paying for clicks that don’t convert.

This way, you can improve your ad performance metrics such as click-through rate, quality score, and conversion rate.

Types of Negative Keyword Match Types

Not all negative keyword matches are the same. The difference is in the degree of control you have over each one. See below to discover the types available to you in Google Ads.

1. Negative Exact Match

An exact negative match is the most restrictive negative keyword match type. It will only exclude your ad from showing when the user’s search query matches the exact term you specified.

You can do this by adding a minus sign before the term. For example, [-red shoes] means your ad won’t show for [red shoes], but it will show for other queries that are different from the term, like [buy shoes] or [red boots].

2. Negative Phrase Match

To use a negative phrase match, you need to put quotation marks around the phrase that you don’t want your ad to show for. This will block your ad from appearing when someone searches for a query that includes the phrase in the same order.

It is useful when you want to avoid showing your ad for a phrase that is irrelevant or unprofitable for your business. For example, if you sell shoes but not used shoes, you can add [“used shoes”] as a negative phrase match keyword to prevent your ad from showing for [buy used shoes] or [used shoes for sale].

3. Negative Broad Match

Sometimes, you might not want your ad to be triggered for certain terms regardless of the order (unlike the exact match and phrase match that follows a specific order). In that case, simply create a negative keyword list without entering any symbols.

For example, if you have [red shoes] as a negative broad match keyword, your ad won’t appear for queries that include all the terms you entered in any order, such as [shoes red] or [best red shoes].

However, your ad will still appear for queries that include some or none of the terms, such as [red boots] or [blue shoes]. This is the least restrictive type of negative keyword match.

You can also use a combination of different negative keyword match types to fine-tune your ad targeting and optimize your campaign performance.

How to Find Negative Keywords

Finding negative keywords is important in optimizing your PPC campaigns and reducing wasted ad spend. Here are some ways to find negative keywords:

• Keyword Research: using the Eye10 Keyword Planner, you can generate ideas and suggestions for the keywords you already rank for. Then you can comb through the lists and identify those unrelated to your business or goals. Eye10 also aggregates data from the Google Keyword Planner, so you don’t have to use two separate tools.

• The search terms report in Google Ads shows the terms users searched for that triggered your ads. You can access it by clicking on the “Keywords” tab in your Google Ads account and clicking “Search terms.” As you browse the report, you will spot some terms that are not relevant to your business, and then you may add them as negative keywords.
• Another Eye10 feature that helps you is the competitor research tool. You get to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for, not just to imitate their strategy but particularly to differentiate yourself by avoiding keywords unsuitable for your niche or strategy.

• Use Google’s autocomplete feature to see what terms are commonly searched with your keywords and then filter out the ones that are not applicable or desirable.
• Sometimes, users may type in a wrong spelling of a word relevant to your business but end up triggering your ads for an irrelevant term. You don’t want this taking up a chunk of your ad spend. Therefore, add common misspellings you can identify to the negative keywords list from the get-go.

How to Add Negative Keywords to Your Google Ads Account

There are two ways to add negative keywords to your Google Ads account: at the account level, campaign, or ad group level. Account-level negative keywords apply to all campaigns in your account, while campaign or ad group-level negative keywords only apply to specific campaigns or ad groups.

To add account-level negative keywords, follow these steps:

• In your Google Ads dashboard, click Tools, and under Shared Library, choose “Negative Keyword Lists.”
• Click the “+” button to add negative keywords.
• Enter or paste the negative keywords inside the box. Don’t forget to hit “save” once you’re done.

Do the following to add campaign or ad group-level negative keywords, follow these steps:

• Sign in to your Google Ads account.
• Click Keywords from the page menu on the left.
• Click Negative keywords.
• Click the plus button.
• You can apply new keywords, a new negative keyword list, or an existing one to a campaign or ad group.

Conclusion

Negative keywords are not a one-time setup but a continuous monitoring and refining of your campaign performance. You should regularly review your search terms report and add new negative keywords or remove old ones as needed.

Also, in addition to your Google Ads setup, tools from Eye10, including the Keyword Planner and Competitor Research tools, would go a long way in helping you optimize your keywords list, whether regular or negative. It takes only a few taps to set up your Eye10 account; start now.