AdWords Negative Keyword Lists: What They Are (And What They Should Be)

People frequently ask what is one thing they can do to make a big impact on their AdWords performance and I always say negative keywords. Reducing unwanted impressions will increase your click through rate, in turn increasing your quality scores and decreasing your cost per click. But having one wrong negative keyword can severely hurt your performance. So you need to carefully manage your negative keywords which can be daunting when you have hundreds or even thousands.

In January Google introduced negative keyword lists to help PPC managers better organize their negative keywords. However, gauging by the limited amount of discussion about them, it seems that people aren’t adopting the use of negative keyword lists very readily. The last few times I’ve mentioned them to other PPCers I got the same response: “What lists? I just use Excel.” Everyone who manages PPC campaigns has excel spreadsheets full of negative keywords ranging from the general ones they like to use for all campaigns to industry specific keywords to client specific keywords. It takes a lot of work to develop good negative keyword lists and keeping those lists handy is very valuable. But, keeping all of this information separate from the client account leaves plenty of room for errors and missing information. Negative keyword lists allow you to keep all of your negative keywords organized directly within the account.

What Are Negative Keyword Lists?

AdWords negative keyword lists are just groups of keywords that you organize together. Those lists can then be applied to campaigns with one action instead of having to copy and paste all of the keywords to each campaign, all while making sure you didn’t copy over any that you don’t really want with each campaign.

Notice I said that you can apply the negative keyword lists to campaigns. More on that later but just remember for now that you can only apply negative keyword lists to campaigns. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t use the lists feature to save groups of negatives for use at the ad group level, you just can’t apply them to ad groups with one click.

How To Use Negative Keyword Lists

Each client has different needs when it comes to organization of negative keywords. For every client, I create a general negative keyword list that includes all keywords that specific client would never want their ad matched with, no matter what. In most cases this involves a lot of *ahem* adult keywords, celebrity names and employment related keywords, among others. I then begin gathering and organizing negative keywords just like I did regular keywords during that part of the account set up. Generally this means organizing the negatives by theme, product or service. For instance, if your client is an auto sales and repair businesses you wouldn’t want your auto sales ads being shown for parts and repair related searches. Despite your best efforts to organize your keywords properly, this can still happen. So, you could develop a list of negatives that include things like parts, replacement, repair, service, etc. That negative keyword list would then only be applied to the auto sales campaigns. Then you would create a list of keywords such as sales, sale, retail, MSRP, dealer, etc. That list would only be applied to the auto repair campaigns.

You may also create themed negative keyword lists such as those relating to cost. If you have a client that offers two levels of service – one that is a low-cost introductory service and one that is a high-end full scale service you may want to create a negative keyword list for keywords like free, cheap, inexpensive, low cost, etc. That list would only be applied to the high-end service campaigns to filter those searches to the lower cost offering. In the future if you find a new cost related word that you want set as a negative for the high-end campaigns, you would only need to add it to the cost themed negative keyword list and it would be added to all of the campaigns you applied that list to. Inversely, if you need to remove a negative from the campaigns, you only need to remove it from the one list rather than all campaigns.

Basically you can use negative keyword lists in any number of ways to organize negative keywords into useful chunks that you can easily apply to campaigns allowing you to quickly add and remove negatives across multiple campaigns with one change.

How to Add Negative Keyword Lists

Once you have your negative keywords organized, you can quickly add them to AdWords through the UI. AdWords Editor doesn’t support negative keyword lists yet.*

When you are in your AdWords account on the campaigns tab, in the flyout on the left, click on ‘control panel and library’ then ‘campaign negative keywords’. Click on the new negative keywords button, name your list, paste the appropriate keywords into the text box and hit save. Repeat this for all of the lists you organized in the previous step.

Now you are ready to assign each list to the appropriate campaigns. Click the ‘all online campaigns’ on the left side flyout to return to your campaign view. Open the first campaign you want to work on and click into the keywords tab, scroll to the bottom and click on ‘negative keywords’ just like you would if you were adding negative keywords right to the campaign. In the campaign level section, click on the add button and choose ‘add keyword lists’. You will see a list of all of the negative keyword lists you created previously. Click ‘add’ next to each one you want applied to that campaign and hit save. Now, any changes you make to the negatives in those keyword lists will be made to the campaigns you applied the list to so you only have to make the change in one place.

That Seems Like a Lot of Work

It can be a lot of work to organize negatives correctly from the beginning and you may be used to just making bulk edits to negative keywords in AdWords Editor. But, properly using negative keyword lists will save you time in the long run and reduce the chance of making a costly mistake. How many times have you reviewed negative keyword lists that had hundreds of keywords in them just to see if there was a certain type of keyword, such as cost related, that may interfere with a new campaign if you just copy them all over from another campaign? If you had your negatives organized by theme, product or desired result you would know where each type of keyword is and could easily include or exclude it from the negatives of a new campaign.

The Future of Negative Keyword Lists

There’s a decent amount of value in the negative keyword list function as it is now. But, I see it becoming much more valuable in the future. First and foremost, we need the ability to apply negative keyword lists to ad groups, not just campaigns. As it stands, even if you create highly organized negative keyword lists, you will most likely still have more ad group level negatives which will live outside of your lists. Without the ability to apply negative keyword lists to ad groups, the usefulness of the lists is dramatically diminished. I still use the negative keyword list functionality to store ad group level keyword groups to keep everything in one place within the account rather than in spreadsheets on my desktop. I don’t apply those lists to any campaigns, I just keep the negatives saved there for reference. At some point in the future I believe Google will allow us to apply negative keyword lists to ad groups so my accounts will be ready when this functionality is available.

A simple yet valuable feature that AdWords needs to add is the ability to click on a negative keyword list to see each campaign that list is applied to before making any changes. Telling us how many keywords are in a list and how many campaigns each list is applied to is marginally valuable. Not having this functionality reinforces my belief that the people who develop features in AdWords don’t ever actually *work in AdWords*. But, I have faith that they will improve the interface in the not-to-distant future and allow full management of negative keyword lists within one tab.

Additionally, it would be ideal for Google to allow negative keyword lists at the MCC level, not just the account level. If you have negative lists that you regularly use on all accounts, having a central place where that list is stored within your MCC which you could apply to any account would save a considerable amount of time for people who manage a large number of accounts.

*Integration with AdWords Editor is a must-have if they want full adoption of this feature but I have a feeling it will be a while before we see that.

Are you using negative keyword lists? If not, why? If you are, do you have any feature requests we can push for?