Negative keywords are an important part of designing any paid search campaign. They’re also often overlooked and frequently under utilized.

Looking at search query reports on a campaign, ad-group, or keyword level certainly makes it clear that without the right negatives, you’re paying for a lot of clicks that just don’t have any chance of converting.

But reviewing query data makes it clear that there’s a use for negative keywords beyond keeping certain queries from displaying your ads altogether. It’s also necessary to use negatives to steer certain queries into the campaigns and ad-groups you’ve setup to target them.

The keyword ‘innova evo dog food’ for example, is matching queries for ‘only natural pet store’ despite the fact that ‘only natural pet store’ is an exact match keyword purchased in a different brand-targeted ad-group.

Innova dog food only represents a fraction of the OnlyNaturalPet inventory, and so it doesn’t make sense to show a brand-specific text ad (and landing page) to someone who might be looking for cat vitamins or even a dog collar. There’s a reason we didn’t put the ‘Innova’ brand keywords in our ‘Only Natural Pet’ brand-specific ad-group.

Yet throught the magic of broad match, it’s Innova dog food specific ads that are being served to these searchers, if we don’t prevent this with the proper use of negatives.

Also since we recently split up many categories and product lines into separate ‘dog’ ‘cat’ and ‘pet’ ad-groups, we’re seeing quite a bit of bleed there – both ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ show up in the ‘pet’ group, and ‘pet’ in each of the others. So now we’ve added the appropriate negatives so the queries respect our intentions; pet ad-groups have ‘dog’ ‘puppy’ ‘cat’ and related negatives, dog ad-groups have ‘pet’ negatives, and so on.

This is an interesting by-product of hyper-targeting the ad-groups, keywords, and text-ads. As our broad-match use is reduced over time the need to watch for this may be reduced, but right now with lots of broad-match still running it’s another thing to keep an eye on.