Negative Keywords

Negative keyword: Definition

A type of keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase. Your ads aren’t shown to anyone who is searching for that phrase. This is also known as a negative match.

For example, when you add “free” as a negative keyword to your campaign or ad group, you tell Google Ads not to show your ad for any search containing the term “free.” On the Display Network, your ad is less likely to appear on a site when your negative keywords match the site’s content.

Negative keywords let you exclude search terms from your campaigns and help you focus on only the keywords that matter to your customers. Better targeting can put your ad in front of interested users and increase your return on investment (ROI).

How they work

One key to a highly targeted campaign is choosing what not to target.

When selecting negative keywords for search campaigns, look for search terms that are similar to your keywords, but might cater to customers searching for a different product. For example, let’s say you’re an optometrist who sells eyeglasses. In this case, you may want to add negative keywords for search terms like “wine glasses” and “drinking glasses.”

Negative keywords won’t match to close variants or other expansions. For example, if you exclude the negative broad match keyword flowers, ads won’t be eligible to serve when a user searches red flowers, but can serve if a user searches for red flower.

If you’re using Display or Video campaigns, negative keywords can help you avoid targeting unrelated sites or videos, but keep in mind that negative keywords work differently for Display and Video campaigns than they do for search. Depending on the other keywords or targeting methods in your ad group, some places where your ad appears may occasionally contain excluded terms. For Display and Video ads, a maximum of 5,000 negative keywords is considered. 

Types of negative keywords

For search campaigns, you can use broad match, phrase match, or exact match negative keywords. However, these negative match types work differently than their positive counterparts. The main difference is that you’ll need to add synonyms, singular or plural versions, misspellings, and other close variations if you want to exclude them.

For Display campaigns, a set of negative keywords will be excluded as an exact topic. Ads won’t show on a page even if the exact keywords or phrase are not on the page explicitly, but the topic of the content is strongly related to the excluded set of negative keywords.

For example, a set of negative keywords like “women’s pants” would block bidding on a page with content about women’s jeans, even if the exact phrase “women’s pants” did not appear on the page. However, we would not generalize beyond the concept of women’s pants to other kinds of women’s bottoms (i.e. skirts) or men’s slacks. This is different from how we would treat a positive keyword, e.g. shoes, which we would also match to a broader category like footwear.

Negative broad match

This type is the default for your negative keywords. For negative broad match keywords, your ad won’t show if the search contains all your negative keyword terms, even if the terms are in a different order. Your ad may still show if the search contains only some of your keyword terms.

Example

Negative broad match keyword: running shoes

Search	Could an ad show?
blue tennis shoes
running shoe
blue running shoes
shoes running
running shoes

Negative phrase match

For negative phrase match keywords, your ad won’t show if the search contains the exact keyword terms in the same order. The search may include additional words, but the ad won’t show as long as all the keyword terms are included in the search in the same order. The search may also include additional characters to a word and the ad will show even when the rest of the keyword terms are included in the search in the same order.

Example

Negative phrase match keyword: “running shoes”

Search	Could an ad show?
blue tennis shoes
running shoe
blue running shoes
shoes running
running shoes

Negative exact match

For negative exact match keywords, your ad won’t show if the search contains the exact keyword terms, in the same order, without extra words. Your ad may still show if the search contains the keyword terms with additional words.

Example

Negative exact match keyword: [running shoes]

Search	Could an ad show?
blue tennis shoes
running shoe
blue running shoes
shoes running
running shoes