Negative keywords are words or phrases that you can add to your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to prevent your ads from appearing on irrelevant sites or videos, or in search results when users search for those terms (or closely related terms).
For example, a luxury shoe retailer running a search campaign could add “cheap” as a negative keyword in Google Ads to prevent their ads from appearing when people search for cheap shoes.
:
Save money – Negative keywords help you avoid paying for clicks from people who aren’t interested in your products or services.
Improve your Quality Score . Negative keywords russia phone number example can make your ads more relevant to your landing pages and increase your quality score (a Google metric that affects whether and where your ads are shown).
Increase conversions . Because negative keywords help you spend your budget more effectively and get better ad placement, you can expect more clicks and conversions (i.e. sales).
Protect your brand image . If you don't use negative keywords, your brand is more likely to be associated with terms or topics you don't like (e.g. "cheap").
Advice
Create a free Semrush account to follow the steps in this guide.
What are negative keyword match types?
When you add a negative keyword to a campaign, you need to choose a keyword match type . It determines the scope of queries that are excluded.
Let's explore these match types with some negative keyword examples:
Note
We'll focus on using negative keywords in Google Ads search campaigns for the rest of this article.
Broad match negative keywords
Broad match is the default setting for negative keywords in Google Ads.