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A negative keyword tells an ad platform which searches should never trigger your ad. Where a normal keyword says “show me here”, a negative keyword says “not here”. Adding “free” as a negative stops your ads appearing for people hunting freebies. For an online store, it is the cheapest way to stop paying for clicks that were never going to buy.
Imagine hiring someone to hand out flyers for your bakery. Keywords decide which streets they walk. Negative keywords tell them to skip the street outside the rival bakery.
Without that instruction, broad targeting spends your budget on searches that share one word with your product and nothing else.
Google offers three, and they behave in the opposite direction from what most people assume.
Negative exact is therefore the narrowest, blocking one specific search and nothing else. Negative broad blocks the widest range.
That inversion trips people up constantly. With normal keywords, broad reaches the most searches. With negatives, broad excludes the most.
Here is the detail that quietly costs money. Google states that negative keywords do not match close variants the way normal keywords do.
So blocking “job” does not block “jobs”. Blocking “repair” does not block “repairs” or “repairing”.
You have to add the singular and the plural yourself, plus any synonyms you care about. Capitalisation and misspellings are handled for you, but grammatical variations are not.
There are limits worth knowing too. For Display and Video campaigns, a maximum of 1,000 negative keywords is considered at account level.
Do not brainstorm these from an armchair. The search terms report shows the actual queries that triggered your ads, and that is where the waste is visible.
Read it weekly at first. Certain categories of waste show up in almost every account.
The fourth category is the expensive one for stores. A shop selling “bench” seating will attract searches for workbenches, bench presses, and benchmarking software.
The saved spend is only half the benefit. Irrelevant impressions also drag down expected click-through rate. That is one of three components behind Quality Score’s 1 to 10 rating.
An ad shown to the wrong person is an ad that does not get clicked. Enough of those and the platform concludes your ad is unappealing.
Removing those impressions lifts click-through rate without changing a word of ad copy. Consequently negatives are often the cheapest quality improvement available.
They tighten your data as well. A clean search terms report makes it far easier to spot which themes deserve their own campaign.
Negatives can sit at three levels, and choosing the wrong one causes most of the accidents. The rule is to add each negative at the narrowest level that solves the problem.
That last use is easy to overlook. If two ad groups both target similar terms, negatives are how you route each search to the right one.
Shared negative keyword lists help once you run several campaigns. You maintain one list and apply it wherever it belongs, instead of editing the same exclusions repeatedly.
Imagine a store called Harrow Optics selling binoculars and spotting scopes. They run search ads on around 200 keywords.
Spend is rising but sales are flat. Pulling the search terms report explains why within minutes.
Their “night vision” keywords are matching searches for night vision in video games. Their “scope” keywords are catching people researching project scope documents.
Meanwhile “binocular repair” brings in people wanting a service Harrow does not offer. Every one of those clicks is paid for.
They add negatives in three tiers rather than dumping everything into one list. Structure matters, because a negative added too high up can block good traffic elsewhere.
Account-level negatives cover the universal waste: jobs, salary, free, wikipedia. Those apply to every campaign safely.
Campaign-level negatives handle category confusion, so “game” and “gaming” go on the night vision campaign only. Ad-group negatives then stop the groups competing with each other.
A week later the waste is still appearing. Harrow blocked “repair” but the searches say “repairs” and “repairing”.
Because negatives ignore close variants, all three forms need adding separately. This is the single most common mistake in negative keyword lists.
Once corrected, the wasted spend disappears. That budget moves to keywords that were already converting, so ROAS improves without any increase in total spend.
Harrow then set a standing habit. Somebody reviews the search terms report every Monday and adds anything new.
The list keeps growing because search behaviour keeps changing. A product launch or a news story can create entirely new irrelevant queries overnight.
They also learn something useful from the discarded terms. Several searches for “binocular repair” suggest a service worth offering. That is a product decision rather than an advertising one.
Negatives are worth revisiting after any account change too. New ad copy or a new landing page can shift which searches the platform decides you match.
The report is the feedback loop. Treat it as a weekly read rather than a one-off cleanup, and the account stays tidy on its own.
Both approaches reduce irrelevant traffic, and they solve slightly different problems. Tightening match types limits how far the platform can wander from your keyword.
Negatives work differently. They let you keep broad reach while surgically removing the specific themes you know are worthless.
Relying only on exact match is safe but limiting. You lose the long tail, and most search demand lives there. Ahrefs found 94.74% of keywords get 10 monthly searches or fewer.
So the usual answer is both. Keep broader matching to discover long-tail keywords, then use negatives to prune what that discovery drags in.
There is no target number, and a long list is not automatically a good one. What matters is that each negative traces back to a real wasteful search you observed.
Copying a generic list from the internet is risky. Someone else’s harmless negative can be your best converting term.
Yes, and over-blocking is a genuine risk. Adding a broad negative at account level can silently suppress traffic across campaigns you never intended to touch.
Watch impression volume after any large addition. A sudden drop usually means a negative is catching more than you expected.
Usually yes, unless competitor bidding is a deliberate strategy. Those searches convert poorly because the person already has a specific brand in mind.
If you do bid on competitor terms, keep them in a separate campaign. That way the poor performance does not distort your main account data.
Watch the legal side as well. Bidding on a rival’s brand name is generally permitted, but using it inside your ad text often is not.
Negative keywords are the cheapest optimisation in paid search, because they only remove spend you were wasting. Build the list from your own search terms report, and remember that plurals need adding separately. Review it as new queries appear.
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