How to Find & Remove Negative Keywords From Your Ad Account

L Vlugt - July 21, 2023September 13, 2023

With over 99,000 Google searches happening every second, it’s important to ensure that your Google Ad is being shown to your most relevant audiences. A highly effective method to achieve this is by optimizing your Google AdWords management campaigns with relevant keywords. The key to Adwords campaign optimization is to find and exclude any negative keywords that may adversely impact your campaign performance. By including only the most relevant keywords, and removing any irrelevant negative keywords, your Google Ads will be shown to your ideal customers. Consequently, showing your Google Ads to the right audience boosts relevant ad clicks, conversions and can increase overall return on investment.

This blog article will cover valuable insights into how you can spot and remove irrelevant negative keywords and use them to optimize your Adwords campaign for success.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are phrases that are selectively excluded from Ad campaigns to improve the relevance of the Ad. There are three types of negative keywords; negative broad match, negative phrase match, and negative exact match keywords.

Negative broad match keywords allow you to exclude your Ad from searches that include every word of your negative keyword phrase, even if the words are in a different order. On the other hand, negative exact match keywords allow you to exclude your Ad only from searches of the exact keyword phrase, without any additional words or phrases. Alternatively, negative phrase match keywords allow you to exclude your Ad from searches that include the exact negative keyword phrase in the same order.

Why Is It Important To Remove Negative Keywords?

It is important to find and remove negative keywords from your Google Ads account for two main reasons; to reduce wasteful Ad spend and to improve the chances of your Ad being shown to your most relevant target audience.

Identifying and removing negative keywords is essential to ensuring that your Google Adwords ad spend is being allocated efficiently. The removal of negative keywords excludes certain phrases from your Ad campaign, allowing you to focus your advertising budget on only the most relevant and beneficial search terms and keywords. If you think about it, including undesirable keywords within your campaign will cost money that you don’t need to be spending, because the audience that the Ad is shown to is likely looking for something else, not directly for what you are offering. By removing these negative keywords, you can then allocate more Ad spend on the most relevant keywords, which will appeal to your most interested users and drive most relevant clicks and conversions. This is why identifying and removing negative keywords can help to lower the Ad spend and improve the return on investment, by showing your Ad to only the most relevant and interested audience.

An additional benefit of finding and removing negative keywords is to prevent your Ads from appearing for Google searches that are not relevant to your business. By removing negative keywords, you are ensuring that your products are put in front of the right customers, to ultimately improve your conversion rate. As such, removing all negative keywords will ensure that your Ads reach your best potential audiences when they are searching for your products or services. These relevant audiences are more likely to convert, increasing your click through rate, conversion rate and conversions.

In summary, the purpose of removing negative keywords is to narrow the focus of your Ads campaign, by removing any irrelevant keyword phrases and honing in on the most relevant keywords that matter the most to your target audience. As a result, using negative keywords to put your ad in front of an interested audience helps to maximize clicks due to your Ad relevance, boost conversion/leads and overall return on investment.

Strategies to Find & Remove Negative Keywords

To create a negative keywords list, you will first need to identify words or phrases that you don’t want to trigger your ads. For example, if your product is high end and prestigious, you won’t want words such as “cheap” triggering your ads, because this will show up in front of an audience that is likely not interested in investing in your product. In turn, removing this negative keyword can help to save your Ad budget by applying the Ad spend to keywords that are more likely to convert and generate a greater return on investment.

A great place to start is within the Google Adwords interface itself. The Google Adwords interface makes finding and adding negative keywords simple, with the integrated Google keyword planner and Google search terms report.

1. Use Google Keyword Planner
   The Google Keyword Planner is a valuable tool for conducting keyword research and discovering new relevant or related keywords. One of its most beneficial features is the ability to analyze past search volume data and view search volume forecasts for particular keywords, which can help to inform how appealing certain keywords will be to your target audience. Although the primary purpose of the Google Keyword Planner is to find the most suitable and relevant keywords for your campaign, it is also an effective tool when identifying negative keywords on Adwords. For example, if you enter the word “shoes,” the Google keywords finder results will show you the aggregate number of monthly searches for that phrase and related phrases such as “basketball shoes.” However, if you are exclusively selling tennis shoes, you may not want to include the keyword “shoes” to ensure that you don’t target the audience searching for “basketball shoes.” The Google Keyword Planner is a useful tool to conduct keyword research and more importantly, identify negative keywords for your campaign.
2. Analyze Your Google Search Terms Report
   Another useful negative keywords tool within the Google Ads interface is the search terms report. The search terms report in your Adwords campaign can be used to identify what phrases or words are triggering your ads. This presents the opportunity to effectively identify and remove any irrelevant search terms and keywords. By adding these irrelevant search terms to a negative keyword list, you can optimize your Adwords performance and ensure that your Ads are only triggering for your target audience’s searches. It is recommended to go through your search results report as regularly as possible, to ensure that your Google Adwords campaign is fully optimized. If you ever want to review your negative keyword list, Google Ads negative keywords can be found in the Google Ads interface under the ‘Keywords’ section.

Need Help Getting Your Ads In Front Of The Right Audience?

Mastering the art of keywords research is definitely not easy, which is why our skilled team is here to help! Our digital marketing and Local SEO team have many years of experience in keyword research and Google Ads optimization. Whether you are just starting out, or need a helping hand to grow your existing Ads campaign, we are always looking to help like-minded businesses harness the power of negative keyword research to put their Ads in front of the right audience. Get in touch with our friendly team to optimize your Google Ads campaign today!