How To Effectively Add Negative Keywords

By Author: Giotto De Filippi
Total Articles: 12
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Negative keywords are one of the most powerful ways to increase the CTR (and so your position) on AdWords for broad and phrase keywords.
Unfortunately there is not much documentation about how to use them in an effective way.

Lets see the different levels of understanding of negative keywords form beginner to advanced:

Dont understand negatives at all, they just dont add them
Add obvious negatives like free to their campaigns
Check their webserver logs or analytics software and look at exact search queries, then add irrelevant words to negatives

However even the 3rd level of understanding is really missing the most important thing!

There is an important distinction to make in negatives:

Negatives that dont make the sale
Negatives that dont get the click


Negatives that dont make the sale are the ones that you can get from analytics - when you get the clicks but those clicks dont make sales: by adding those negatives youll increase your conversion ...
... rate but not necessarily your CTR.

Negatives that dont make the click are like a hidden disease: some people search but never click, so you have no way to know that these impressions happen and so to put them as negative. Reason being that with an analytics software you can track the search query that generated a click but there is no way to know which search query generated an impression that never got a click.

Note: Even if an impression doesnt make the click its costing you money because it lowers your CTR.

One way I found to help in this task is to write an advert that is as generic as possible for your topic: what will happen is that some people will click on it as they find it somewhat relevant no matter what they search.

Example if you write Buy in your advert the chances of someone that had the word Free in this search query clicking is very low, so you may simply never realize that anyone is searching Free and put it as negative - however if the advert is completely generic you have more chances to get a click from both free and buy.

Of course this generic ad is just a first phase of your campaign to learn negatives, after that youll try targeted ad variations to improve your CTR and conversion rate.


Giotto De Filippi is an expert consultant with both Adwords and SEO. He writes on his blog PPCHACKING.COM giving advanced tricks about how to get better results with Adwords. A lot of emphasis is put on the Quality Score technology Adwords uses. He has 10 years Internet Marketing experience and has worked both for very large corporate clients and small to medium business - consistently achieving noticeable improvements for his customers.