Adwords Negative Keywords

Google offers negative keywords as a keyword match type to filter out unwanted/irrelevant impressions that may have been triggered by Adwords broad match keywords. When applying the appropriate negative keywords, you reduce your cost-per-click (CPC) and increase your ROI.

Negative keywords can be applied to ad groups and/or campaigns of your Google Adwords account. You can add, edit, and delete negative keywords, and export your entire negative keyword list onto spreadsheets.

3 Types of Negative Keywords

Use negative phrase-matched keywords and negative exact-matched keywords if you want your broad match keywords to be triggered by more search queries. For example:

Negative Keywords: -free trial

Adding this negative keyword to your account would prevent your ads from showing on any search queries containing the terms free and trial. It wouldn’t prevent your ads from showing on variations of these terms, however. It also wouldn’t prevent your ads from showing on search queries that only contain one of the terms. The search queries one-day trial and free test could trigger your ads, while free one-day trial could not.

Negative Phrase-Matched Keywords: -"free trial"

If you were to add this keyword to your account, the system wouldn’t let any search query containing the phrase free trial trigger your ads. The search query free trial lesson would not trigger your ads, for instance. Your ads could possibly show on the search query trial or free one-day trial.

Negative Exact-Matched Keywords: -[free trial]

This negative keyword would only prevent your ads from showing on the search query free trial. Search queries such as free trials, free, and one-day free trial could still trigger your ads.

Negative Keywords for Adwords Content Network

The principle of negative Keywords for Adwords content network campaigns and ad groups work the same way as that of search network campaigns and ad groups. Adwords often broadens negative keywords to include the synonyms or variations for content network.

Create Negative Keywords

To create your negative keyword list, think of search queries that you do not want triggering your ads and specify the irrelevant terms as negative keywords by placing a negative sign (–) before the word. Find negative keywords also through:

    Google Keyword Tool Find Negative Keywords
  • Google’s new keyword tool (requires logging onto Adwords account)
    Google New Keyword Tool Beta

Use SEO Book’s negative keyword wrapper tool to add the negative sign (-) to each of your keywords in your negative keyword list (which will be ready to import into your Google Adwords campaigns and/or ad groups).

Comments

6 Responses to “Adwords Negative Keywords”

  1. Twitted by gordonchoi on January 19th, 2010 11:24 am

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  2. Kent on January 19th, 2010 1:27 pm

    Hope to see some more advanced tricks

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  4. uberVU - social comments on January 19th, 2010 4:38 pm

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by gordonchoi: PPC Blog: Adwords Negative Keywords – http://tinyurl.com/y8rrx2d…

  5. Bindu on April 12th, 2010 11:01 am

    Hi:

    Found this to be an interesting read that may be of use to AdWords newbies, I work on the official AdWords Help Forum and wondered if you could be interested in syncing up and having your blog post featured on the forum.

    Do let me know,
    B

  6. KeywordTerminator on May 20th, 2010 1:52 pm

    Hi there, thanks for a great article. Negative Keywords can save you a lot of money, or if you are willing to keep your PPC spend the same, can make you a lot of money!

    Defining negative keywords can be a long, slow arduous task. Either by guesswork or by trawling through loads of enquiry data, most businesses just do not have the time to search for irrelevant keywords and simply end up with a few negative words in their campaigns.

    We’ve personally fallen foul of not implementing negative keywords which is why we built a great solution to automate the whole negative keyword process. You can check it out at KeywordTerminator.com and also pick up our Free White Paper, Be Positive – Go Negative.

    Cheers, Steve

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