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What are Negative Keywords?
Negative keywords let you exclude unwanted and irrelevant search terms from your campaigns and help you focus on only the traffic that matters to you.
Ad group and campaign-level negatives can also be used to direct the budget where it needs to go through. This helps in making sure that your ad is put in front of the relevant users and you get better returns on your investments.
Types of Negative Keywords and How Do They Work?
Broad Match Negative Keywords:
These prevent your ad from showing if the search query contains all the terms of the broad match negative keyword in any order. This also means that the words' spelling should match the search queries.
For example: If you sell luxury watches and add cheap watches as a broad match negative keyword, your ad won't appear for searches like
shop cheap luxury watches or
watches at cheap rates.
However, if the customer searches for a cheap luxury watch, your ad can show up.
Phrase Match Negative Keywords:
These prevent your ad from showing if the search query contains exact keyword terms in the same order
For example: Adding the phrase match negative keyword "free shipping" would prevent your ad from showing when users search for phrases like
luxury watches with free shipping or
free shipping of watches.
However, for the searches like shipping watches for free your ad will show up.
Exact Match Negative Keywords:
These prevent your ad from showing if the search query exactly matches the keyword.
For example: Using the exact match negative keyword [discount] would exclude your ad from appearing for search query discount and it will continue showing ads for search queries like watches on discount, and luxury watches on offer.
Negative keywords do not match to close variants or other expansions. For example, if you exclude the negative broad match keyword offer, ads won’t be eligible to serve when a user searches for luxury watches offer but can serve if a user searches for luxury watches on sale.
What Is Keyword Conflict and Why Does This Happen?
Negative keywords are intended to prevent ads from showing on irrelevant search queries. Still, they might sometimes block normal keywords also from matching relevant search queries and this makes your campaigns less effective. When this scenario occurs, the corresponding negative keywords are termed Conflicting Negative Keywords.
For example, let’s say this is our normal keywords list:
[luxury watches]
"branded watch for women"
cheap branded accessories
And now, let’s assume the negative keywords added are:
"luxury watches"
branded
Now, as "luxury watches" is added as negative in a phrase match, this means, it will block the search query luxury watches, which is added as an exact match keyword. This leads to restricting the traffic to the keyword which was added with an intention to show ads. Hence, the query "luxury watches" is marked as a conflict.
Similarly, broad match negative branded will restrict the traffic for both “branded watch for women” and cheap branded accessories keywords. It’s because these keywords contain words branded in them. And therefore, branded here is a negative keyword conflict.
Why Do We See Traffic for Restricted Normal Keywords?
The conflicting negative keywords often block the search queries that are similar to the normal keywords. However, these normal keywords can still match with the singular, plural, misspellings, etc, that is all the search query variants and therefore, can still show ads and have traffic.
How to Manage Negative Keyword Conflicts?
You can resolve these conflicts by:
Removing the negative conflict if you do not intend to restrict the search query and you’d like to show ads for even more searches.
Pausing the keywords that are getting restricted traffic due to negative keywords, if not needed anymore.
Analyzing the match types of the negatives and observing if they were an intended addition, and if required, making them stricter. For example, if you are looking to block a single term from showing your ad then it’s a good idea to add that single term as an exact match negative rather than broad.
The 'Fix Conflicting Negative Keywords' Optmyzr Express suggestion allows you to review all conflicting keywords and gives you the ability to pause or remove them with one click.