Everything you ever wanted to know about negative keywords

For those of you looking to refine your AdWords campaigns and improve your return on investment, we have some helpful tips on negative keywords for you.

A negative keyword is a special kind of keyword matching option that allows you to prevent your ad from appearing when the specific terms are a part of the user’s search.

Some advertisers have told us they’re nervous about using negative keywords because they fear it will reduce the traffic to their sites. If your goal is simply to increase traffic, then you may not want to use negative keywords. But if your goal is to find qualified leads, negative keywords will help filter out some of the traffic that you may not want. For example, if you're selling clothes, but you don't sell shorts, you can make ‘shorts’ a negative keyword. That way you won’t show your ad to a shopper looking for shorts (which may help you save money). You can learn more about how to choose negative keywords here.

Negative keywords can apply at two different levels: campaign-level and Ad Group-level. You can learn more about how to add negative keywords to your account here. If you want even more info, check out the advanced Google Advertising Professionals lesson on Exact Match vs. Negative Match optimizations.

Posted by Andrew, Inside AdWords crew