If these keywords are included in the search query, your ad will not show. Negative keywords are commonly left out of the setup process and can cause a lot of irrelevant traffic and wasted spend. We find that a lot of campaigns that are created by non-Google Ads professionals, or those created with the help of Google’s assistance typically don’t have negative keywords in place. 



Further to this, these campaigns typically use broad match keywords which puts the campaign at even greater risk of high wasted spend. In this article, we’ll explain where you can use negative keywords, how they work and some examples that you might want to include in your search campaigns.



How to Use Negative Keywords

With a Google Search campaign, you are able to appear in front of anyone who does a Google Search and that opens up a lot of room for error and variety! Negative keywords should be added during campaign set up. This ensures that you are excluding irrelevant search terms from the get-go. You should also constantly monitor your search term report and continue to update your negative keywords as you see irrelevant search terms to ensure you are constantly refining your campaign, making it more relevant to future traffic.


If you are using broad match keywords, broad match modifiers, phrase match, or even exact match (although to a lesser degree), you should be using negative keywords. The broader your keywords (i.e. short tail, single-word keywords or broad match type keywords) the more risk your campaign has of appearing for irrelevant keywords.


When building your negative keyword list, you want to think of common words that might be associated with your keywords but aren’t actually relevant to your campaign. We’ll offer some common negative keywords further along in this post.



A note on spellings and variations:

One of the biggest differences between negative keywords and positive keywords is that you will need to add misspellings, variations, synonyms and plurals as negative keywords if you want to exclude them.

Where Can I Use Negative Keywords

Negative keywords can be used in a range of campaign types. 

Google Search

You can use broad match, phrase match and exact match keyword match types, however, these work a little differently to positive keyword match types. We’ll explain further below.


Google Shopping

You can use negative keywords to specify search terms you don’t want your shopping ads to appear for, despite not having targeted keywords in the campaign. This can be extremely useful if your products are appearing for unrelated searches.


Google Display & Video Ads

These will be excluded as an exact topic. If the page is strongly related to the topic or contains the topic, your ads won’t show. You can also use other exclusion targeting methods with Display and Video to further control the content and websites your ads appear on (we highly recommend this!)



Negative Keyword Match Types

Also, negative keywords can also use broad match, phrase match and exact match types. So if you want to exclude an exact search term, use exact match. If you want to exclude one word completely, use a broad match. Negative keywords do not use broad match modifier match types. Here’s a breakdown of the different match types for negative keywords.

Broad Match

The default setting for negative keywords is broad match. If you add a negative broad match keyword, all queries that contain all words within the negative keyword will be excluded, however, if a search term matches with only one of the words in the negative keyword, it will still show.


Let’s look at an example. 

Negative keyword: blue shirt

Phrase Match
With phrase match negative keywords, your ad won’t show if the search contains the exact keyword terms in the specified order. Other words can be used in the search, but if the negative keyword appears anywhere in the search query in the order specified by the phrase match keyword the ad won’t show.


Let’s look at an example. 

Negative keyword: "blue shirt"

Exact Match
With exact match negative keywords, your ad won’t show if the search query contains the exact keyword, in the same order and without any extra words within the phrase.

Let’s look at an example. 

Negative keyword: [blue shirt]

Common Negative Keywords

There are some keywords that we apply to almost all Google Search Campaigns. For example. a lot of people look to study or get a job in particular industries so it’s important to exclude potential words related to studying or working in a field. Some of these common negative keywords include free, cheap, courses, salary, and wages. 

Other great negative keywords include research-based keywords like ‘how-to’, ‘how can’, ‘what do’, where relevant. Each campaign and business will have different negative keywords based on the products and services they offer. Other common negative keywords include adult-related content, such as ‘porn’, ‘nude’, ‘xxx’ because you are dealing with the general public and you just want to be sure you’ll never show for anything like that!

Conclusion

Negative keywords are an important component of Google Ads campaigns and can save you lots of money when utilised. It’s important to keep your negative keyword list updated over time based on search traffic so your campaign is as relevant as possible to your search traffic.



Use match types to get the most out of your keywords, and don’t forget to include negative keywords in your campaign from set up to give it the best chance of success from the start.