This is not some existential “glass half empty” discussion. I’m talking about negative keywords in your paid search marketing campaigns. Back in the early days of my blogging, I walked you through the basics of AdWords settings, measuring performance, and keyword research. These discussions were aimed at mitigating unnecessary costs and improving conversion/click activity. I’d like to shift the PPC discussion to a more negative topic—negative keywords.

What is a negative keyword?

Since we’re going to be using Google AdWords as the working example in this discussion, I’ll defer to them for the definition of a negative keyword:

Why are they important?

Google clearly mentions a few key reasons why they’re important. They help define a better target audience, reduce ad spend by limiting exposure for irrelevant keywords, and increase your return on investment. They are particularly handy when you have a long list of broad match keywords that could be prompting several unrelated search queries.

For example, let’s pretend you sell custom phone skins. You’re bidding on the broad match keyword “custom phone skins”. Your ad may be prompted when someone searches for “phone wallpaper”. This audience is irrelevant to your business and will likely not result in a sale. By adding the negative exact match keyword [phone wallpaper], you will prevent that query from prompting your advertisement (you could narrow your audience further by simply exact matching the original keyword).

Where can I find them?

Let’s talk Google AdWords. There are a few places in Google AdWords to view and edit your negative keywords. It’s important to note that you can add negative keywords at the campaign level or the ad group level. Be sure you pay attention to your settings so you don’t accidentally apply or forget to apply the keyword to the correct grouping.

The first place you can look is under the keywords tab within any campaign. If you scroll to the bottom of your keyword list, you’ll see a small text link callout for “Negative keywords”. If you click that, it will expand the negative keyword section for that campaign.

From here, you can select add, edit, delete, or download to edit your lists. You can also select “Add keyword lists” which allows you to pull a previously uploaded list from your Shared library.

The Shared library is located in the left column below “All online campaigns”. From here you can add a “New negative keyword list” that can be shared across all of your campaigns. This makes it a lot easier to add universal keywords to your account. Simply name the list, add the keywords in the second open field, and click “Save”. As I mentioned before, you can select these lists under the “Add” drop down in the negative keywords section mentioned above.

The last place you can find negative keywords is under the keywords tab again. This time, however, you’ll select from the “See search terms” drop down located below the line graphs. By selecting “All”, you’ll be shown your search query report. This report details the exact search phrases used that prompted your ads to show.

This report allows you to add new keywords or negative keywords to your campaigns. This is the fastest way to determine if the broad and phrase match keywords you’re targeting are forcing your ads to show when they shouldn’t be. Here is what your list might look like:

Note the two items marked as “excluded”. Those keywords were selected and added as negative keywords to their respective campaigns. Both keywords fell outside of the scope of the campaign and were easily removed. This allows are budget to be used on keywords that drive higher value and conversions through the website.

By going through and adding these negative keywords, you’ll also improve your quality score significantly. Broad match terms tend to drive lower quality clicks because of the myriad of keywords used to prompt the advertisement. By excluding these keywords, you’ll increase the average quality score of the broad match keyword, which can lower costs and improve positioning.

Wrapping Up

Google AdWords is full of amazing options you can use to improve your performance. Negative keyword matching is one of the most helpful, because it ensures that you’re funneling your ad budget through the right channels. Here’s the obligatory easy-to-read list of benefits:

• Reduce CPC
• Improve conversion rate
• Lower cost per conversion
• Increase average quality score
• Find the right audience

Use negative keywords in your campaigns if you’re in search for the perfect audience and need to make every penny count. And let’s be real…who doesn’t want that?