Negative keywords, the words an advertiser wants PPC platforms like Google Ads and MS Ads NOT to bid on, matter so much to a successful ad campaign, we’ve seen them lead to market domination in many cases. Yet, because Google Ads has many bad keyword clicks that go unsold — and they want to sell them to someone — negative keywords hurt their bottom line and that’s why they do those 3 things to minimize their popularity:
1. They Recommend Everything, EXCEPT Negative Keywords
The list of PPC platform recommendations is truly all-encompassing: They want you to switch to performance max, add new keywords (sometimes unrelated), change exact match keywords into broad match ones, but have you noticed how they never insist you add more negative keywords?
Even in worse search ad campaigns we’ve ever audited, the “Recommendations” section never ever mentions negative keywords. That’s because, frankly, they have no choice but to allow negative keywords, otherwise professional campaign managers would be outraged, but it’s in their best interest to not insist on them.
2. They Make It Difficult To Find & Add Negative Keywords
The official way to research and add negative keywords is nothing short of excruciating. You have to visually look at all search terms including those you have already approved all over again everytime and try and spot irrelevant keywords. Then, when you select and add them, you have to edit them to just the part you want to be negative and select a different match type, etc… The process isn’t intuitive at all—it’s frustrating, inefficient, and seems designed to make negative keyword research harder than it needs to be.
Incidently, that’s why we created UltraGranular, a negative keyword tool that makes it easier by not showing you again negative keywords you’ve seen before, identifying for you the most likely candidates, and letting you add negative keywords simply by point and clicking. You should try it for free here.
3. They Even Recommend You Remove Them
Not only do PPC platforms not recommend negative keywords, they will, however, recommend you remove them in some cases. In particular when there is a conflict between a keyword you bid on and a negative keywords you’ve added.
So How Can You Use That Situation To Your Advantage?
PPC platform’s non-promotion on negative keywords truly proves their utmost importance. The real reasons negative keywords are so important are:
- By not bidding on irrelevant keywords, you save money to bid more when relevant keywords come along.
- By not showing your ads on irrelevant keywords and showing up only on relevant ones, your ads naturally get more clicks (more people want to click on ads that match their intent than on ads that don’t), you increase your click-through rate, improve your tenure in Google Ads’ algorithm and end up paying less per relevant click than you would otherwise.
- And you leave competitors in the dust. Let them bid on bad keywords while you bid only on the good ones.
Negative keywords are the single most important way to win at Google Ads or Microsoft Ads. You should monitor your search terms using UltraGranular to add negative keywords regularly. Every week when starting a new campaign and at least monthly afterwards.
