🔥 Tier 1 - Must KnowID: negativeKeywords
Negative Keywords
Terms you exclude to stop wasting spend
In Simple Words (Zero Jargon):
Terms you exclude to stop wasting spend
Why It Is Critical
Negative keywords are the terms you explicitly exclude from triggering your ads. They are not a secondary concern - they are as important as your positive keyword list. In a new campaign, reviewing the Search Terms Report and converting irrelevant queries into negative keywords is one of the highest-ROI activities in account management. Without negative keywords, even the best keyword strategy leaks budget to irrelevant traffic.
Strategic Rules of Thumb & Execution Playbook
- Before launch: add obvious negatives based on your offering. If you sell premium software, add 'free', 'crack', 'torrent', 'cheap'.
- After launch: review the Search Terms Report weekly for the first month. Anything irrelevant becomes a negative.
- Use negative keyword lists at the account level for terms you will never want - then apply them to all campaigns at once.
- Apply negatives at the correct level - campaign-level negatives apply to all ad groups; ad group-level negatives are more surgical.
'Every rupee spent on an irrelevant click is a rupee that could have gone to a high-intent query. Negative keywords are not maintenance work - they are budget recovery.'
What You Get: A progressively tighter campaign that wastes less budget on irrelevant traffic with every week of optimisation.