Google Ads’ negative keywords functionality is an incredibly useful tool to help ensure your ads are as targeted as possible. But what are they? And what’s the best way to implement them? We’ll be answering those questions in this blog post.
What Are Negative Keywords In Google Ads?
Negative keywords are those you add to your ad (either in the campaign or ad group) that won’t trigger your ad if searched. To put into an example, if you were running an ad campaign to offer iPhone refurbishment, then the list of negative keywords for that campaign might include other phone manufacturers, like Samsung and Huawei because your ad showing up for keywords relating to those manufacturers would be pointless.
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The Best Ways To Use Negative Keywords
The best way to use negative keywords in Google Ads is to think about specificity. What do we mean by this? Well, in the example above we were talking about campaign-wide negative keyword implementation. That’s because we wanted to preclude a very broad range of keywords outside of anything iPhone-related. But what if we wanted to be more specific?
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Let’s take that same example from before, now, but say our goals are more specific. Here, we’re talking about ad group targeting. Let’s say that we’ve got an ad group set up specifically for iPhone 10 refurbishment. We don’t want this ad to be triggered by search terms relating to iPhone 9 or 11 refurbishments, so what we do is add negative keywords (like “iPhone 9 refurbishment”) to the negative keywords for the iPhone 10 refurbishment ad group.
Broad, Phrase Or Exact Match – It’s Up To You
The last thing worth noting is that, just like with regular keywords on Google Ads, your negative keywords can either be set to broad match, phrase match or exact match depending on your needs.
If you need help with your PPC advertising, then why not get in touch? We’d be happy to help!
Written by Uzair Kharawala
Partner at SF Digital Studios, a Google Premier Partner agency. Uzair has been helping businesses grow with Google Ads since 2002 and teaches it every week on YouTube.
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