When advertising your business, it's important to ensure that you're targeting the right people. You don't want to waste your time and money on ads that are not relevant to the viewer. That's where negative keywords come in. In this blog post, we'll discuss what they are and why they're important, and how to use them to boost your advertising campaigns.

What is are negative keywords?

A negative keyword is a word or phrase that you add to a specific list in your ad campaigns to prevent your ad from showing up for specific searches. For example, if you sell shoes but do not sell children's sizes, you would add "kids" as a negative. This way, if someone were to search for "kids' shoes," your ad will not show.

Top 5 benefits of negative keywords:

1. Save you money by preventing your ads from being shown to people who are not interested in what you're selling
2. Help you focus your ad campaigns so that they are more targeted and effective
3. Help increase the click-through rate (CTR) of your ads
4. Help improve your advertising campaigns by making them more relevant to potential customers.
5. Help improve your quality score

How to use negative keywords

There are several ways to use negative keywords in your advertising campaigns. The most common way is to add them to your negative keyword list. This will prevent your ads from being shown to people who search for those keywords.

Another way is to add them to your ad groups. This will prevent your ads from being shown to people who are in those ad groups so you don't pull traffic that should be going to another ad group.

Finally, in Display campaigns, negative keywords are not used as keywords specifically but used as topics or content exclusions. Ads won't show on pages if the topic of the content is related to the negative keywords so those keywords don't have to be on the page specifically.

By using negative keywords, you can ensure that your ads will not be seen by people that aren't a good fit. This will save you money and boost the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.

If you misconfigure or do not set up a negative keyword list, you may waste a lot of your advertising spending targeting people who will never convert. This could be prevented by understanding how to target using these lists in your ad campaigns properly.

Improperly targeting your ads is one of the biggest factors that lead to wasted ad spending. If you are not careful with your targeting, you could waste a lot of money on ads that no one will ever see. To avoid this, it is important to understand how to use negative keywords in your advertising campaigns. By using these keywords, you can ensure that interested people only see your ads.

To summarize, negative keywords are an important tool for advertisers. They can help improve your quality score, save money, and make your campaigns more targeted and effective. You can then ensure that your ads are seen by people interested in what you're selling.

Terry Rajaram

Terry’s cauldron of knowledge in the digital world is the result of a background in advertising, graphic design, web and multimedia development… 25 years in this business.