Do you engage in a lot of paid search marketing? Or have you just signed up for an AdWords account? Are you a veteran PPC warrior? Or a novice, making your first foray into the search engine-fueled war for higher CTRs and better leads?

Either way, what you don’t want to be is a person who underestimates the value of negative keywords. Why? Because they can have a truly monumental impact on your campaign and can directly affect the amount you spend as well as the quality of your leads.

Here, for the noob and professional alike, I’ve created a short guide on everything that’s essential to formulating a negative keyword strategy that works for you. Read on.

Make Lists – Save Time
Creating one or several negative keyword lists (depending on the scope of your operations) can be an exceptionally useful strategy to help manage your PPC campaign. This especially relevant when you run several campaigns and/or want to prevent your ads from showing up for several categories of keyword. Instead of updating each campaign individually, a negative keyword list allows you to quickly add and remove keywords to all the campaigns that share the same list.

A great strategy is to create lists of similar keyword categories. For example, if you only sell ERP applications to the shipping industry, you may want to create a negative keyword list that prevents your ad from showing up for industry specific queries like “manufacturing ERP”, etc. Similarly, if you only market your products to a specific set of regions you may want to create a list of geography-based negatives.

Be Proactive
If you have key words that you definitely don’t want your ads to show for, make sure you add them to your account. You’ll find that adding negative keywords can save you considerable amounts by reducing the number of irrelevant clicks you pay for. For example, if you sell farming equipment, a keyword search for the same will yield the following results:

Depending on the nature of your product, you’ll want to add various keywords to your negative keyword list. If you own a crop farming equipment dealership, it’s clear that several keywords in the list including “antique farm equipment” and “dairy farm equipment” should go straight to the negative keyword zone. Similarly, if you don’t sell used equipment the corresponding keywords should be culled.

Indulge In A Little Matchmaking
There are three types of negative key word matches – negative broad, negative phrase and negative exact.

Negative broad matches prevent your ad from showing up for search queries that contain the entire phrase regardless, of the order the individual words appear in.

For example, if you add “dairy equipment” to the broad match category, your ad will not show up for queries like “equipment for dairy” or “best dairy equipment”. However, the ad will be displayed if the search query contains one of the terms used i.e., “best farm equipment” or “old dairy farm”

Negative phrase matches work in a similar fashion to broad matches with the only exception being that your ad will show up if words added the query split up the negative key phrase.

For example, if you add “black shirts” to the negative phrase category, your ad will not appear for search queries like “brand new black shirts” or “black shirt designs” in addition to the primary negative keyword phrase. However, if the terms “black” and “shirts” do not appear adjacent to each other (“black and blue shirts”), your ad will be displayed.

Negative exact matches will only prevent your ad from showing up for the specific phrase that you negate. Any additions or changes to the phrase will result in your add popping up for the query.

The following table will help you figure out exactly how negative keyword matches work to block your advertisements.

Get That Long Tail Swishing!
You can also use negatives to ensure that long tail queries are directed to an ad by listing synonyms as negatives. If you sell plus size clothing for women, you could add “women clothing” or “clothing for girls” to your negatives list. This may go against the grain in principle, but it will ensure that you receive more impressions for a query like “plus-size clothing”, and fewer impressions for highly generic search terms (which may or may not be what you want or need).

Reflect & Review
Remember that negative keywords are expected to block irrelevant traffic from eating up your advertising dollars. But maybe you’re expanded your operations and developed new products or maybe popular trends or changing lifestyles have altered search query patterns. Either way, you might just wake up one day to realize that a specific negative is blocking out positive traffic.  So from time to time, ensure that you execute a complete review of all your negative keywords to ensure that they’re all still in line with your marketing goals.

Root Around In Your SQR
Search query reports (SQRs) are a great way to figure out exactly which keywords are triggering your ads and will look something like this:

When you work with AdWords, you’ll have access to an SQR that gives you loads of information about the specific keywords your ads showed up for along with impressions, clicks, CTR percentages and even conversion numbers for each. Make sure you go through these reports with a fine toothed comb and place low-performing or irrelevant queries into your negative keyword lists.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, pretty much covers everything I have to say about negative keyword strategies. Well… almost everything at any rate. Here’s a final bit of advice: Remember to use negative keywords for both your search and display ads.