Negative keywords let you exclude search terms from your campaigns and help you focus on only the keywords that matter to your customers. Better targeting can put your ad in front of interested users and increase your return on investment (ROI).
How They Work
One key to a highly targeted campaign is choosing what not to target.
When selecting negative keywords for search campaigns, look for search terms that are similar to your keywords, but might cater to customers searching for a different product. For example, let’s say you’re an optometrist who sells eyeglasses. In this case, you may want to add negative keywords for search terms like “wine glasses” and “drinking glasses.”
Negative keywords won’t match to close variants or other expansions. For example, if you exclude the negative broad match keyword flowers, ads won’t be eligible to serve when a user searches red flowers, but can serve if a user searches for red flower.
Types of Negative Keywords
For search campaigns, you can use broad match, phrase match, or exact match negative keywords. However, these negative match types work differently than their positive counterparts. The main difference is that you’ll need to add synonyms, singular or plural versions, misspellings, and other close variations if you want to exclude them.
For Display campaigns, a set of negative keywords will be excluded as an exact topic. Ads won’t show on a page even if the exact keywords or phrase are not on the page explicitly, but the topic of the content is strongly related to the excluded set of negative keywords.
For example, a set of negative keywords like “women’s pants” would block bidding on a page with content about women’s jeans, even if the exact phrase “women’s pants” did not appear on the page. However, we would not generalize beyond the concept of women’s pants to other kinds of women’s bottoms (i.e. skirts) or men’s slacks. This is different from how we would treat a positive keyword, e.g. shoes, which we would also match to a broader category like footwear.
Negative broad match
This type is the default for your negative keywords. For negative broad match keywords, your ad won’t show if the search contains all your negative keyword terms, even if the terms are in a different order. Your ad may still show if the search contains only some of your keyword terms.
Example
Negative broad match keyword: running shoes
| Search | Could an ad show? |
|---|---|
| blue tennis shoes |  |
| running shoe | |
| blue running shoes |  |
| shoes running | |
| running shoes | |
Negative phrase match
For negative phrase match keywords, your ad won’t show if the search contains the exact keyword terms in the same order. The search may include additional words, but the ad won’t show as long as all the keyword terms are included in the search in the same order. The search may also include additional characters to a word and the ad will show even when the rest of the keyword terms are included in the search in the same order.
Example
Negative phrase match keyword: “running shoes”
| Search | Could an ad show? |
|---|---|
| blue tennis shoes | |
| running shoe | |
| blue running shoes | |
| shoes running | |
| running shoes | |
| bluerunning shoes | |
Negative exact match
For negative exact match keywords, your ad won’t show if the search contains the exact keyword terms, in the same order, without extra words. Your ad may still show if the search contains the keyword terms with additional words.
Example
Negative exact match keyword: [running shoes]
| Search | Could an ad show? |
|---|---|
| blue tennis shoes | |
| running shoe | |
| blue running shoes | |
| shoes running | |
| running shoes | |
Symbols in Negative Keywords
You can use three symbols, ampersands (&), accent marks (á), and asterisks (*) in your negative keywords. Negative keywords with accent marks are considered two different negative keywords, like sidewalk cafe and sidewalk café. Similarly, “socks & shoes” is different than “socks and shoes”.
Here are some of the symbols that our system doesn’t recognize:
- Ignored symbols: You can add periods (.) to your negative keywords, but these will be ignored. That means the keywords Fifth Ave. and Fifth Ave, for example, are considered identical negative keywords. If you add pluses (+) to your negative keywords they will usually be ignored (for example blue+car), however in some cases if a + is at the end of a word (for example C++) it will not be ignored.
- Invalid symbols: You’ll see an error message if you add negative keywords that contain certain symbols. Some of the symbols that can’t be used in your negative keywords are: , ! @ % ^ () = {} ; ~ ` <> ? \ |.
- Site and search operators: The “site:” operator will be removed from your negative keywords. That means if you add the negative keyword [site:www.example.com dark chocolate], it’ll be considered the same as [dark chocolate]. Search operators will also be ignored. For example, if you add the search operator “OR” to the negative keyword dark chocolate, like “OR dark chocolate,” the “OR” command will be ignored and your negative keyword will be just dark chocolate.
- Other search operators: Adding a minus (-) operator to the front of a keyword will cause this keyword to be ignored for negative keyword matching. For example, if you have a negative keyword “dark -chocolate,” it’ll be considered the same as just “dark”.
Keep in mind
- Choose your negative keywords carefully. If you use too many negative keywords, your ads might reach fewer customers.
- Negative keywords do not match to close variants so your ad might still show on searches or pages that contain close variations of your negative keyword terms.
- There’s no negative broad match modifier match type.
- Your ad might still show when someone searches for a phrase that’s longer than 16 words, and your negative keyword follows that 16th word. Let’s say your negative keyword is “discount.” Your ad can show when someone searches for “nice clean hotel rooms or bed and breakfast rentals in Los Angeles CA close to beach discount” because your negative keyword is the 17th word in the phrase. On the other hand, we won’t show your ad when someone searches for “nice clean hotel rooms or bed and breakfast rentals in Los Angeles close to beach discount” because your negative keyword is the 16th word in the keyword.
I’ve put together a Negative Keyword List you can use with your campaigns. I will explain how to use the list in an upcoming class. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it will certainly help improve your campaign until you;ve had time to run some ads and find to erroneous clicks.