Relevance is the name of the game when it comes to search. Searchers want meaningful results when they perform queries. Advertisers want searchers who are genuinely interested in their products and services. Search engines want quality results to keep both searchers and advertisers coming back.

Negative or excluded match keywords will prevent your ads from appearing if the keyword search contains the negative keywords. Negative keywords can be extremely effective tool in improving the relevance of your ads, increasing your click-through rates, lowering your costs, improving your ad position and more.

For example imagine you are in the business of selling Caribbean vacation cruises and are bidding on broad match for the keyword “cruise.” You discover that your ad is appearing for searches done on the keyword “tom cruise” which is completely irrelevant to your business. You could add the negative keyword “tom” to suppress your ad from displaying when a search includes “tom.” Because your ad copy relates to vacation cruises it most likely was not getting many clicks for searches done on “tom cruise” and so you had high impressions with low clicks volume. By adding the negative keyword you will decrease impressions but maintain clicks and build a healthier CTR (Click-Through Rate) which can help improve ad position and decrease CPCs (Cost Per Click.)

Below are some suggestions on how to get started adding negative keywords to your PPC campaigns.
Identify opportunities:
Below are some ways you can look for keywords that may benefit the most from adding negative keywords.
- Very high impression keywords
- Low CTR keywords
- Very short keywords (1 or 2 words long)
- Very generalized category type terms
- High spend, low conversion keywords

Determine the negative keyowrds:
Now that you’ve identified keywords that may benefit heavily from negative keywords you’ll need to figure out which negative keywords to add.
- Use the keyword research/suggestion tools from the search engines. Enter your keywords and see what kind of similar suggestions the engine suggests. Look for irrelevant or undesirable variations of your keyword.
- Do an actual search on your keywords and see what types of ads come up. Are there ads appearing for non-competitors and unrelated products and services? Find out what other industries share your keywords and add negatives accordingly.
- You may at some point run into trademark violation issues with a competitor or affiliate. You can add negative keywords for that competitor’s trademarked words to ensure your ad doesn’t appear and infringe on their trademark.

Add the negative keywords:
You now know what keywords need negatives and which negative keywords to use. It’s time to get your hands dirty and add them to your accounts.
- Negative keywords are typically entered at the campaign level. Generally you’ll need to visit your campaign settings pages to apply the negative keywords.
- Some platforms such as Microsoft’s adCenter let you apply negative keywords at the keyword level for an even greater level of control.
- Refer to your ad platform’s help files on adding negative keywords if you have questions or need help.

Remember to re-evaluate your negative keywords frequently. New businesses, products and events are changing and expanding the keyword searches being done every day.

Trevor Norman is a regular contributor to SearchMarketingGuys.com and also works as
an account manager for Microsoft adCenter.