Negative Keyword Types

By continually tweaking and updating your PPC campaign over time, your ad targeting is going to become stronger and stronger and your click through rate is going to be higher, and you will lower your ad spend.

Negative Keywords are arguably the most important part of any PPC Ad campaign to save you money that you can use for getting more clients, instead of wasting your money on unwanted and irrelevant search terms over and over again!

If you have not recently pulled a search query report and looked at it with your own eyes, you should do this ASAP. By going through this report, you will be able to identify irrelevant search queries and add them as negative keywords to campaigns. This will save you money immediately!

Google will automatically associate "variations" of your targeted keyword with the same query, but this doesn’t happen for negative keywords. 

There are 2 different ways that you can implement your negative keywords. 

Campaign Level Negative Keywords

The first is at the campaign level, and that means you won’t ever show any of your ads for these keywords through your entire campaign.

For a law firm, it would be beneficial to have campaign-level negative keywords for different types of law that your practice does not cover. This will ensure that your entire campaign is not wasting money and driving up CTR on keywords that none of your ads should be showing.

This will also save you time and money by not following up on irrelevant leads and calls wasting time answering questions instead of signing new clients.

Adgroup Level Negative Keywords

The second is Ad group level negative keywords that will protect certain individual ad groups from other ad groups in your campaign. This gives you control over which parts of your campaigns are serving for your targeted keywords. 

With ad group level negative keywords, you can make sure that your ad groups are not conflicting with each other by stealing their impressions. 

It is recommended to use your shared negative keyword list in Phase Match and Exact Match campaigns and not mix match types in same campaign. This can create a Partial Negative Keyword conflicts and block your impression share.

Negative Exact Match

For negative exact match keywords, your ad won't show if the search contains the exact keyword terms, in the same order, without extra words. Your ad may still show if the search contains the keyword terms with additional words.

For negative phrase match keywords, your ad won't show if the search contains the exact keyword terms in the same order. The search may include additional words, but the ad won't show as long as all the keyword terms are included in the search in the same order. The search may also include additional characters to a word and the ad will show even when the rest of the keyword terms are included in the search in the same order.

This type is the default for your negative keywords. For negative broad match keywords, your ad won't show if the search contains all your negative keyword terms, even if the terms are in a different order. Your ad may still show if the search contains only some of your keyword terms.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2453972?hl=en

Instead of having your ad spend go to hundreds of low-quality searches, Negative Keywords have your budget go towards the people who actually have real buying intent. 

Visitor clicks from Negative Keywords cause your ad costs to be a lot higher and also gives bad feedback data back to Google and Microsoft regarding those keywords. 

If your PPC Ad campaign is paying for irrelevant clicks you are not only wasting money, your conversion numbers will not be accurate. 

If you have traffic coming to your site that is quickly leaving from an ad delivery, this is a BIG RED FLAG to Google Ads and your ad costs, even for your best converting keywords is going to be higher.

Over a period of time Negative Keywords are going to save you a big amount of money on your clicks.

Negative Keywords will decrease your cost per conversion, increase your return on investment (ROI), because you are getting really clean clicks from relevant people.

Showing your ad to someone whose search intent has nothing to do with your law firm's ad will lead to either a wasted impression or a wasted click, which ends in lost money.  

An irrelevant click is a wasted click and a waste of your campaign budget. 

Negative Keywords used properly can save you a lot of ad spend money. 

Negative keywords help drive relevant traffic to your landing page.

Negative Keywords will insure that your ads are only being shown for relevant searches.

With Negative Keywords, you select which keywords you want to prevent your ads from showing up.  

The key to a highly targeted campaign is choosing what keywords NOT to target.