Positive news for negative keywords

Negative keywords are a great way to refine your keyword lists and filter out unwanted impressions for your campaigns. By excluding specific terms that aren’t relevant to the services you offer, you can improve the relevance of your ads and make your campaigns more effective.

In addition to filtering out specific terms in the context of a single ad group or campaign, many advertisers maintain a set of core negative keywords across several campaigns. Examples of these terms might be free or trial -- search terms that aren’t promising if you’re looking to sell products on your website. Negative keywords like these don’t require granular management on the campaign level, and we’ve heard from many of you that you’d like a more scalable way to manage these broadly-applicable sets of terms.

Now, we’re happy to introduce a new way to manage negative keywords across multiple campaigns: negative keyword lists. With these lists, you’ll be able to manage a group of negative keywords in your account’s Control Panel and Library and associate them with multiple campaigns.

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For example, say you have a set of negative keywords you always add to any campaign running on the Search Network. Previously, you’d need to copy that set to every new search campaign you created in your account. Now, with shared lists, you can simply create a single negative keyword list and associate it with each search campaign. If there’s a new negative keyword you’d like to add to all of those campaigns, just add it to your list and it will automatically update across each campaign. Similarly, if you create a new campaign, you can add your negative keyword list to exclude all of the necessary terms with just a few clicks.

Visit our Help Center to learn more about how to get started with negative keyword lists.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew