Paid advertising is a powerful tool within a well-crafted digital marketing strategy. It can significantly boost brand visibility, generate leads, and increase revenue for your business. While Google isn’t the only platform for paid ads, strategically executed campaigns with the right targeting can help you reach a variety of audiences. To ensure your campaign’s success, it’s crucial to select keywords that drive conversions and increase your Click-Through Rate (CTR), ensuring your ads are seen by those actively searching for relevant terms.
However, not all keywords are effective for your goals. For instance, a donut shop wouldn’t want to show up for searches related to running shoes. This brings us to the concept of negative keywords—terms that help filter out irrelevant searches, ensuring your ads only reach the right audience. By incorporating negative keywords, your marketing team can improve the success of your paid campaigns by preventing wasted spend and increasing campaign efficiency.
If you’re new to paid advertising, check out our page on everything you need to know about paid advertising.
Negative keywords play a crucial role in ensuring your ads don’t appear in search results irrelevant to your business. By blocking ads from being shown to users searching for unrelated terms, you maximize the chances of reaching your ideal audience, helping you optimize your campaign budget and avoid spending money on clicks that won’t lead to conversions.
The success of your paid campaigns depends on precise targeting. Focus on relevant keywords while refining your bids to enhance your ad relevance and improve both click-through rates (CTR) and conversions.
Every business aims to drive conversions and grow its customer base. Negative keywords play a vital role in this process by enhancing the relevance of your ad groups. This ensures that one ad targets a specific set of keywords, making your ads more aligned with user intent and increasing the likelihood of clicks and conversions. It’s easy to spend money on ads, but true success comes from conversions, which ultimately lead to a positive ROI.
Using negative keywords effectively boosts your Click-Through Rate (CTR) by ensuring your ads appear only for relevant searches. This minimizes wasted clicks, exposing your ads to more qualified leads and improving the quality of traffic. By refining where your advertising budget is spent, negative keywords help save money and enhance your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), ensuring every dollar goes further.
Negative keywords are a crucial element in optimizing your ad campaigns. They help to refine the targeting of your ads, ensuring that they are shown only to users who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. Here’s why negative keywords should be a part of your strategy:
When it comes to negative keywords, you can assign them at either the campaign or ad group level, choosing from broad, phrase, or exact match types. The key is understanding how each match type works to maximize the effectiveness of your negative keywords and keep your campaigns relevant.
Each match type serves a specific purpose in filtering out irrelevant traffic. Here’s a breakdown of each one with clear examples for easier understanding.
Broad match negative keywords are a powerful tool to prevent your ads from showing up in searches that contain any word from your chosen keyword phrase, in any order. However, it’s important to note that while these keywords stop ads from appearing for exact matches of phrases like “blue running shoes,” they might still show up for search queries such as “blue tennis shoes” or “running gear.” This means your ad could appear for partial matches, but not for the exact phrase or word order.
While broad match negative keywords can effectively filter out unwanted traffic, they also have the potential to limit your reach more than exact or phrase match negatives. It’s crucial to research and evaluate all possible variants of the terms before assigning them, ensuring that you don’t inadvertently block traffic related to relevant topics or subjects surrounding the keyword.
Negative phrase match keywords prevent your ad from being shown to people who search for the exact keyword phrase along with additional words before or after it. For instance, if “full body massage” is set as a negative phrase match, your ad won’t appear for searches like “full body massages near me” or “deep tissue full body massage.” However, it could still show for searches such as “facial and back massage” or “shoulder massage.”
Using phrase-match keywords is typically the safest choice, as the search query must explicitly include the keyword phrase. This method reduces the risk of unintentionally excluding relevant searches, yet it still narrows down the audience for your ad, ensuring it reaches a more specific group.
Negative exact match keywords prevent your ads from appearing in search results where the exact keyword phrase is used. For example, if you set “winter holidays” as a negative exact match keyword, your ads will be excluded only when someone searches for that exact phrase. However, if someone searches for a variation like “winter holiday deals” or “winter holidays 2025,” your ads may still appear.
When working with a larger ad budget, you have more flexibility to target exact match keywords, as these are very specific. But if you’re working with a smaller budget, it’s best to use the more restrictive match types—broad and phrase match. These can help ensure your ads reach the right audience and maximize your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), ultimately improving your campaign’s efficiency.
When starting your keyword research, it’s essential to understand the language your target audience uses when searching for products, services, or content related to your site. This means analyzing, comparing, and prioritizing the best keyword opportunities.
As you analyze the search terms you want to target, it’s also a great time to identify keywords that should be added to your negative keyword list. For instance, if you’re selling ‘running shoes,’ you’ll want to exclude terms like ‘high heeled shoes’ or ‘dancing shoes,’ which don’t align with your product. By adding these irrelevant terms to your negative keyword list, you can ensure your ad campaigns are more focused and cost-efficient.
A crucial step in your keyword research is quickly checking the top 10 keywords you plan to target by running a Google search. This allows you to identify irrelevant or undesirable terms and prevent wasted ad spend. Add search results that don’t align with your goals or terms you want to avoid to your negative keyword list.
For example, if you’re an online tutor looking for students, searching for the term ‘online tutor’ may bring up unrelated results, such as job listings or offers for free online tutoring. In this case, terms like ‘jobs’ and ‘free’ would be considered negative keywords and should be added to your negative keyword list to ensure your ads reach the right audience.
Once you’ve identified the negative keywords relevant to your campaign, it’s crucial to categorize them for better organization. You can group them by types such as competitors, irrelevant terms, or keywords that don’t align with your business. This classification helps in organizing your negative keywords and making the decision process easier when managing your Google Ads account.
To add negative keywords to your Google Ads account, first, navigate to the ‘Negative Keywords’ section under the ‘Keywords’ tab in the left-hand panel. Click on the blue ‘+’ button to add the negative keywords to your list. From here, you can choose whether to apply them at the campaign or ad group level. Once added, you can easily track and manage all the negative keywords within the displayed negative keywords table.
When creating a negative keyword list for your campaigns, it’s important to start with a broad set of generic negative keywords. These terms are widely used across many industries and can be applied to all of your search campaigns. However, take the time to review the terms to ensure they don’t accidentally overlap with your business’s relevant keywords.
Additionally, it’s a smart move to create a brand-specific negative keyword list. This list should include major corporate brands you want to avoid, such as ‘Nike,’ ‘Amazon,’ or ‘Starbucks.’ This way, your ads won’t be shown when someone searches for these well-known names.
Lastly, consider adding your own brand name to your negative keyword list. While this might seem counterintuitive, users who search for your brand name are likely already familiar with your offerings. This prevents your ads from targeting users already intent on finding your products or services.
Negative keywords play a crucial role in refining your ad targeting by preventing irrelevant traffic. You can choose to add negative keywords at either the campaign level or the ad group level, each serving a different purpose.
At the campaign level, you apply negative keywords to ensure your ads don’t appear for specific terms across your entire campaign. This broad approach blocks irrelevant searches that may affect the performance of all ad groups within the campaign.
On the other hand, applying negative keywords at the ad group level gives you more control. Exclude certain terms within a specific ad group to ensure your ads aren’t shown for irrelevant keywords.
For instance, if you’re promoting “red running shoes” in one ad group, you may want to exclude keywords like “jumpers” or “skirts” from showing up in that specific ad group. However, those terms might not be negative for other ad groups focused on different products.
This strategy helps you keep your ad targeting tight and your budget focused. By placing negative keywords at the right levels, you can significantly improve the efficiency and relevance of your campaigns.
Negative keywords are essential for filtering out irrelevant searches and enhancing the precision of your campaigns. Excluding unwanted terms ensures your ads reach users actively searching for products or services like yours, driving more relevant traffic. This practice saves money by avoiding clicks from uninterested users and boosts your campaign’s overall Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). Whether at the campaign or ad group level, strategically placing negative keywords will help refine your targeting and improve the effectiveness of your ads.
Building a strong negative keyword list is key to optimizing your Google Ads campaigns. Start by compiling a set of broad, generic negative terms that can be applied across various campaigns. Consider creating brand-specific negative lists to avoid competing with large companies, as well as adding your own brand name to prevent wasting ad spending on users who are already familiar with your business. Regularly reviewing and updating your negative keyword lists ensures that your ads are only reaching the most qualified audience, maximizing your budget and improving campaign efficiency.
Negative keywords aren’t just for paid advertising; they can also enhance your SEO efforts. By analyzing search queries that lead to irrelevant or low-value traffic, you can refine your content strategy and avoid targeting terms that don’t align with your business goals. Excluding irrelevant keywords from your SEO targeting helps you focus on the search terms that truly matter, improving the quality of organic traffic. This approach enables you to allocate resources more effectively, driving higher-quality visitors to your site and boosting your SEO performance in the long run.
Incorporating negative keywords into your Google Ads campaigns is essential for improving targeting, saving money, and increasing ROI. By understanding how to apply negative keywords at both the campaign and ad group levels, you can ensure your ads reach the most relevant audience, eliminating wasted clicks from irrelevant searches. Using various match types—broad, phrase, and exact—helps fine-tune your targeting and optimize your ad budget. Always start by identifying negative keywords during keyword research and continue refining your lists as your campaigns progress. By managing and categorizing negative keywords effectively, you’ll enhance the overall success of your paid ads, leading to higher conversion rates and better performance.
You can add negative keywords at any time, and considering how keyword matching works now, it’s best to start your campaigns and ad groups with them. The Google Ads Editor (standalone software) does have a steep learning curve.
You can create negative keyword lists in the regular web interface. I usually create one called “Always Bad” when I have access to an account. To do this, simply search for “negative keyword lists” at the top of the interface, which will lead you to the shared library. You can create a list named “Always Bad” or even “Bad for {Campaign Name}” and start practicing to become more comfortable with managing them. Try adding words in phrase match, such as:
“salary”
“jobs”
“resume”
“amazon”
“free”
“cheap”
These are good examples of irrelevant terms you might want to exclude from your campaigns.
You can only add negative keywords during campaign setup through Google Ads Editor. To do so, select “Keywords” and then “Negative” under Keywords & Targeting in the Manage box. This will allow you to add negative keywords at the campaign level. Alternatively, you can set up a Negative Keyword List at the account level and apply it to your new campaign. This method provides flexibility, as it lets you manage negative keywords across multiple campaigns without needing to add them individually. It also streamlines the process, ensuring consistency in your keyword targeting across your account.
Adding negative keywords might feel overwhelming (you don’t want to make a mistake), so let me walk you through how I taught my former clients to do it effectively.
Start by going to the Search Terms report and sorting the table by ‘cost.’ Focus on the search terms that are draining your budget but are irrelevant to your industry or product.
Add these terms as negative keywords, and I recommend using either phrase or exact match types for better control.
Next, sort the table by ‘impressions’ to spot the search queries your ads are eligible for. Again, add irrelevant queries as negative keywords (use a phrase or exact match).
Sometimes, it’s more effective to block certain terms or queries entirely. For example, if your target audience is only in the US and you see searches like “Canada stuffed toys,” add “Canada” as a negative keyword with a broad match to avoid showing ads to Canadian searchers.
Make this a habit by checking and updating your negative keyword list at least once a week. This will help you continuously reduce wasted ad spend and focus your budget on the right audience.