Keywords & Targeting
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are terms added to a campaign, ad group, or shared list that prevent ads from showing on searches containing them.
In practice
Negative keywords are the primary tool for keeping paid search spend on relevant queries. Every account should have a library of them built from the search terms report: job seekers, DIY intent, free, cheap where price shoppers are unwanted, competitor names you do not want to pay for, and the long tail of unrelated meanings your keywords happen to match.
Negatives have match types too, and they do not use close variants. An exact negative blocks only that query; a phrase negative blocks any query containing the phrase in order; a broad negative blocks any query containing all the words in any order. Most damage in the accounts we audit comes from phrase and broad negatives that are too short, and from shared lists attached to campaigns they were never designed for.
The self-blocking check is simple: cross-reference every negative against every active keyword and every converting search term. Anything that overlaps is suppressing revenue. We run that check before adding a single negative and review search terms every business day.
Why it matters
They are the cheapest optimization in paid search and the most common source of self-inflicted damage.
See it in a real accountThe Liquor Barn: removing 23 self-blocking negatives brought branded sales back the same week
RELATED TERMS
Search Terms Report
The search terms report lists the actual queries that triggered your ads, with performance metrics for each, as opposed to the keywords you bid on.
N-gram Analysis
N-gram analysis breaks search terms into their component one-, two-, or three-word sequences and aggregates performance by sequence, revealing which words drive waste or conversions across thousands of individual queries.
Phrase Match
Phrase match is a keyword match type, written in quotes, that shows ads for searches that include the meaning of the keyword, with additional words allowed before or after.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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