How To Add Negative Keywords In Google Ads

What Are Negative Keywords?

When you setup a Search campaign, you use keywords in Google Ads for targeting. You pick keywords you think your target audience would type into Google search so you can show them ads. If you sell shoes for women, then you might want to use keywords such as “women’s running shoes” or “running shoes for ladies”. You are using these keywords to target prospective customers in order to compel them to click on your ad and ultimately make a purchase on your website.

Negative keywords are used for the opposite purpose. You use negative keywords to identify a word or phrase (search terms) you do not want to target. Negative keywords allow you to exclude search terms from your campaigns. They allow you to really focus your keyword efforts so you only show your ads for search terms you want to target.

Better targeting can lead to better performance, reduce spending money on irrelevant search terms and improve your ROI.

How Negative Keywords Work

Negative keywords are all about focusing on what not to target. As you build out your keywords using different match types, you will find that the keywords you add to your campaigns will trigger your ads to show for actual search queries beyond the keywords you see in your campaigns.

For example, if you add a the keyword phrase “women’s running shoes” as a phrase match, then your ad could actually be triggered for search queries such as “free women’s running shoes” or “used running shoes for women”. Learn more about keyword match types and how they work.

If you sell brand new women’s running shoes, then you probably do not want to show your ads for these search queries. Although these search queries are highly similar to the keyword used in this example, they are not what you want to target. In this case, you would want to add negative keywords for “free” and “used”. Doing this will keep your ads from showing for any search query that has the word “free” or “used” in them.

Types Of Negative Keywords

There are three different types of negative keywords you can use for search campaigns. They are broad match, phrase match and exact match.

Broad Match Negative Keywords

Broad match negatives are the default negative. If you don’t want to use broad match, then you will need to make sure you make them phrase or exact match. When you use broad match negative keywords, your ads will not show when the search contains all of negative keyword words. Your ads could still show if the search contains only part of your negative keyword phrase. Let’s use an example.

You add the following broad match negative keywords – men’s shoes

Phrase Match Negative Keywords

In order for phrase match keywords to work, the actual search query needs to contain the exact negative phrase in the exact same order. So, order matters here. The search query can contain additional words. But, as long as the search query contains your negative keyword phrase in the same order, your ad will not show. See how this works in the table below.

You add the following phrase match negative keywords – men’s shoes

Exact Match Negative Keywords

Now the exact match negative keywords are much more….exact. For exact match negative keywords to work, the search query has to contain the exact keyword phrase in the exact same order. And, there cannot be any additional words. See the example below.

You add the following exact match negative keywords – men’s shoes

As you can see, exact means exact.

Transcript

How To Add Negatives At The Campaign Level

Hey everyone, it’s Nick with Growmeo and in this video tutorial today, I’m going to show you how to add negative keywords in Google Ads. I’ll show you how to add negatives at the campaign, ad group, and account level. Let’s get started. All right, first for campaigns, select the campaign that you want to add negatives to. So, make sure you’re in the very specific campaign. And if you already know a keyword that you want to add to the campaign, you can come down here to keywords, then click on the negative keywords tab. And because you’re already in the campaign, all of these negatives that you see here are based on level, all these over here are at the campaign level. And let’s say you wanted to add the word free. Make sure you’re in the appropriate campaign.

Type the negative keyword free in the box and then click the save button and that will add the word free to your negative keyword. So any search query that has the word free in it is not going to trigger your ads in this campaign. The other way to do it is to go through the search query report. So, click on insights and reports, then search terms. And what you’re seeing now are the actual search queries.

These search queries are what people actually type into Google Ads to trigger your ad. So, it isn’t always just the keyword that you’re looking at. These are the actual search queries. And so, this is for a fencing company. And anything that doesn’t have the word fence, fencing or fencers or anything similar to those words or a synonym of fence, I’m not sure what that would be. We don’t want our ads to show. So, what I’ve done is I actually have a filter. I’m filtering the search terms and I’m telling Google, show me everything that does not contain fence, fencing, fence, or other misprononunciations.

And so if we want to use the search query report, analyze that to discover negative keywords we want to add, this is how you do it. In this case, what I would do is I would actually just select all of these because again, we don’t want ads to show for anything that doesn’t have fence or fencing in this particular campaign. So I would select all of these, click on this button here, add as negative keyword and I select the level. It begins with an ad group campaign or keyword list which you can apply to all campaigns in the account or select campaigns. We’re going to select a campaign. Come down to the bottom and click save. And that is the other way you can add negative keywords at the campaign level.

How To Add Negatives At The Ad Group Level

Now I will show you how to add negative keywords at the ad group level. We’ll stay here at the search query report. Let’s say that you only want to add a negative keyword for a very specific ad group and not at the entire campaign level. Let’s just arbitrarily pick a keyword and the same process. We’re going to add it as a negative keyword and it already defaults to the ad group. In this particular campaign, there’s an ad group already selected.

So, you want to be careful of that. If this isn’t the appropriate ad group and you have multiple ad groups in the campaign, come up here to select an ad group and we’ll pick the one that you want.

Right now, these are showing all the ad groups in this particular campaign. We’ll click one and that ad group is doing well because there aren’t any keywords that don’t have the word fence in it. But let’s say for example, we want to add this as a negative, but just for the appropriate campaign or excuse me, ad group level. Click it. Click the button. Ensure it’s an ad group here. Be sure you’ve got the appropriate ad group over here. And then press save. The other way to do it is much like we did with the campaign. Go into the ad group you want to be in. Make sure you’re in the appropriate ad group. Click on keywords. Click on the negative keywords tab. Click the blue plus button.

Again, double check that this is the appropriate ad group and simply type in the keyword that you want to add and then press save. Those are the two ways to add negatives at the ad group level.

How To Add Negatives At the Account Level

Finally, I’m going to show you how to add negative keywords at the account level. Again, there’s two ways to do it. We can go to the search terms report. We’ll click on a keyword that we want to make a negative keyword. Click on the add as negative keyword. And at the account level in this particular account, I’ve already created an account level list. That’s why you’re seeing this here. I created that. And I’ll show you how I did that in a minute. So, check that. And I label everything that’s account level. I make it simple. And I just label it account level. That tells me that if I add this negative keyword, it’s going to apply to all campaigns, keywords, ad groups for the entire account. It doesn’t and this will apply to anything that is already in the account and anything that you create going forward.

So if I were to select or hit save then this particular keyword negative keyword phrase I should say will be applied to the entire account level.

Now where is this particular list?

 In order to find that hover over tools under shared library go to the exclusion list. This is where you can create lists for negatives. In this particular case, you can see the account level negative list that I created. Now, if I wanted to add again a keyword up here because I already know what I want to add.

Go to the appropriate keyword list and just type in the word you want and click save. As you can see, this particular list has 579 negative keywords. And because I’m applying this list to all the live campaigns in this account, all 579 negatives are being applied to all of my live accounts. Essentially, it’s at the account level because it’s for all campaigns that are currently running.

And that is how you add negative keywords in Google ads at the account level, the campaign level, and the ad group level.

The Wrap Up

• Negative keywords are used to keep your ads from showing for certain words or phrases.
• Using negative keywords are a good way to reduce wasted ad spend and to improve performance.
• There are three types of negative keywords: negative broad match, negative phrase match and negative exact match.
• Negative keywords do not match variations which means your ad could still show for search queries that are similar to your negative keywords. For example, if you add the negative keyword phrase of “men’s shoes” your ad would still show for a search query that has “men’s shoe”.