How to Find and Add Negative Keywords to Your Campaigns

So the other day I wrote on how your keyword report can be used to optimize your campaign. I briefly covered how you can find options for negative keywords to add to your campaign. Today I wanted to expand on how to find negative keywords and how to enter them into your campaign.

Negative keywords are great optimization tools that help to refine your results and target your campaign. There are several keyword suggestion tools on the net, but dedicated negative keyword tools are harder to find. However, you can use keyword tools to mine for options.

You can find negative keywords at the same time as you are adding regular or “positive” keywords. The trick is to start from a broad perspective and then whittle down options from there. For example, you are running a site selling concert tickets. You go through and look for keywords related to your products. Let’s say you search for “carrie underwood” as a keyword.

As you can see, there are a lot of searches for this. So it’s important, if you choose to bid on keywords like this, that you are receiving the most targeted searches. If you bid on “carrie underwood,” you may also receive searches like the ones highlighted here. Are those relevant to a concert ticket site?

You can prevent that from happening by adding these terms into your negative keyword list. In this case, add “cmt,” “award,” “interview,” or “magazine.” This can help you to filter your results and get the best use out of this term.

Negative keywords are defined as terms that can be connected to your search terms, but are not relevant to your content. You can learn more about these here:

Negative Keywords: Doing The Dirty Work

(Targeting is key. Always look for the terms that are closest to your content.)

You could also use Google’s keyword suggestion tool to find options for positive and negative keywords as a way to research for more options. You should always be testing for the combination of keywords to gain your desired results. Here is an example:

As you can see, you enter a term in the search box. The results show up on the bottom part of the page. To the left, you can add terms to an “excluded terms” list in order to filter your results. As you progress, you can then copy the terms that you have excluded and enter them into your campaigns.

Now, for placement of negative keywords, you have two options: add them at the campaign level, or the account level. It is often a good idea to add negative keywords that are specific to your campaign at the campaign level. Save your more general negatives (xxx, porn, sex, free, etc.) for the broad account level.

You can find these here:

Account level:

Campaign level:

Click here and you’ll be taken to this area:

You can enter one keyword per each line and then click Save.