How Negative Keywords Help Advertisers to Better Target Their Ads

How Negative Keywords Help Advertisers to Better Target Their Ads

If you ever run a paid campaign with Google Ads, you must aware or might hear about “Negative Keywords”. In this article we are going to explain how negative keywords will help advertisers to better target their ads so it can appear to the potential customers or audiences.

The Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement is such an incredibly powerful tool, when you execute your ad campaign properly and target your audiences with the relevant keywords.

Negative Keywords comes into play when you want to keep your campaign away with irrelevant clicks, which ultimately save money that you had invested on a particular ad campaign, as you will be charged as and when someone click on your ads.

The highly targeted ads must contain both, relevant keywords as well as negative keywords. Being an advertiser you want to show your ads to each and every potential customer; but at the same time you must keep your ads campaign away with the one who is not your targeted customer. Negative keywords ensure that your money will not waste on irrelevant clicks, and keep your ROI (Return on Investment) high.

How to find Negative Keywords?

Though, Google is well aware about irrelevant clicks, and therefore they have provided a solution called “Negative Keywords”, within their Google Ads Pay-Per-Click platform. Negative keywords can help an advertiser to target the ads in a better manner, and ensure to cut down on irrelevant clicks.

There are many keyword research tools available in the market through which you can find valuable negative keywords for your ad campaign. Though, many of these tools are quite good and give you the best results as well, some of them are Ahrefs, SEMrush and Uber Suggest but they are paid tools and hence require monthly subscription at least. Though, you can get a free 7 day trial for SEMrush.

However, within the Google Ads there is a Google Keyword Planner, which is absolutely free keyword research tool and quite powerful as well. You can fetch much important information along with large volume of essential “Negative Keywords”.

You will find the Google Keyword Planner in the top right of your Google Ads interface, under the “Tools & Settings” option.

Is Negative Keywords are different from other Keywords?

Yes, negative keywords is just opposite of relevant keywords, they restrict your ad campaign to show to an irrelevant customer, who is convert as a potential customer.

In order to know about the difference between negative keywords and relevant keywords, just go to Google.com where you will get a perfect example as why Negative Keywords is different and plays a vital role when someone runs search ads.

Without negative keywords, your ads are likely to trigger to the people who performs dissimilar searches. If someone who searches with non-relevant terms and your ad will trigger, you will have to pay for every such click, but such unrelated click will never draw a customer in.

How many types of Negative Keywords are?

Google and Bing Ads offers three different types of negative keywords:

Exact match negative keyword

The Exact Match negative keyword available to the advertisers who use Google and Bing Ads. An exact match keywords allow you to target the exact keyword specifically or the close variants. Exact match keywords perfectly match all of the keywords in the search query, exactly as entered.

Exact match keywords exclude search terms that are not match exactly to the specific keyword.

Exact match keyword always mentioned in square brackets, example [exact match keyword].

Phrase match negative keyword

Phrase match keywords are more targeted than broad match, though more flexible than the exact match keywords. Whenever advertiser use a phrase match negative keyword in their ad, he/she will block the ad from appearing for any search query that contains the keyword.

Phrase match example: A phrase match negative keyword setting that allows the ad to show only when someone search includes the exact phrase of your keyword.

Phrase match keyword always mentioned in inverted commas, example “Phrase match keyword”.

Broad match negative keyword

Broad match keywords helps you to reach the wider audience, it also helps to prevent your ads from showing up for searches that contain any of the words you have specifically specified.

When you use broad match keywords, your ad is eligible to appear whenever someone search with a query that includes any word in your key phrase, in any order.

Broad match is the default match type for keywords, so if you haven’t adjusted your keywords’ match type, they’re currently set to broad match.

Broad match keyword always mentioned in simple language without any punctuations or brackets, example Broad match keyword.

How you can find Negative Keywords?

Find Negative Keywords through Manual search

Manual Search method is quite straight forward, all you need to do is to take the keywords that you want to promote for and enter it into Google.com. You will notice “organic listings”, “paid results”, “Top stories” as well as “People also ask for” section for that particular keyword in the search result.

Find Negative keywords through Auto complete search

The auto complete search results on Google and Bing can also give you quite helpful tips for search results. For example, if you type something for search, the search engine auto complete the sentence with other related keywords which have been searched by another users. Just see the example as shown in the image below:

Why do you add negative keywords to your ad?

Negative keyword is a keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase. Negative keywords ensure advertisers that ad doesn’t show if someone tries to search with an irrelevant keywords. By preventing ad from triggering on irrelevant searches, you save money on unwanted clicks and create much more opportunities in order to display your ad to the relevant and potential customers, which ultimately leads to conversion.

What type of keywords should be added as negative keywords?

Each and every keywords that has nothing to do with your business, or make negative impact to your ad campaign, it must count as a negative keyword. The negative keywords does not relate at all, to the products or services that you sell or promote.

Where do we put negative keywords in Google ads?

You can add individual negative keywords to your ad groups as well as in your ad campaigns.

For applying negative keywords, you have to Select Keywords and Targeting > then Keywords, Negative.

Then click Add negative keyword and select Ad group negative keyword or Campaign negative keyword.

Select the destination for the new negative keyword, if prompted and then click OK.

How do I create negative list for keywords?

In order to create negative keyword list,

• You need to go to page menu on the left, then click Keywords.
• Click Negative keywords at the top.
• Click the plus (+) button .
• Select a campaign, then select the particular campaign in which you want to add the negative keyword list.
• Enter or paste one negative keyword in each line in text field.