Definition

Negative keywords are keywords that you put in your campaigns and once you put them in there, the campaigns stop triggering for those keywords

Key points

When should you use Negative Keywords?

<aside> ‼️ IMPORTANT: If a keyword is like bleeding you, you should negative it in that campaign. I am definitely against that.

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• If the keyword is irrelevant. Use a 100% negative keyword if you are selling a hair supplement and the keyword is fur supplement. So obviously you do not want to trigger a fur supplement if you're selling a product for human beings. So that's the only case that's 100% is if you are triggering for some reason for irrelevant keywords, you want to negative those.
• If you have a discovery campaign. So, if you have a discovery campaign like an Auto, Broad and Phrase, and you decide that these keywords are good keywords so you’re going to take them out and start running them in Exact.
  • What happens is you might want to put a negative keyword in those Broad campaigns and whatnot because for some reason you may not want it to trigger in the Broad campaign.
  • It's 50-50.
    • When you negative it in the Broad and then run it as an Exact and it does phenomenally well.
    • In other cases, when you don't even negative exact it and the Broad one is performing amazing or
    • the Broad one was performing amazing and then you negative it in that campaign and put in an exact campaign and then it's not performing well anymore.
  • What happens is Amazon will trigger at the highest bid. So if you have two campaigns with the exact same keyword and one has a higher bid than the other, what's going to happen is Amazon is going to trigger for the higher bid. It's that simple.
    • So if you do extract that keyword, don't negative it and put it in an Exact campaign and the bid's higher than it is in the Broad campaign. It's going to trigger that Exact campaign.

<aside> 💡 If it's performing well in the Broad campaign, don't negative it to start and see what happens. And if it's doing well, keep it. If it's not doing well, negative it, see what happens in the Exact. It's just one of those things where you're going to have to split test.

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Bleeders

Bleeders are keywords that are getting many clicks with no sales. So they're basically bleeding you dry of the money.

• A lot of people will say negative them but don’t. Instead, just slowly decrease the bid on them.
• Decrease, decrease, decrease, decrease. It's going to get to a point where the bid just becomes very, very low. And in that case, it's going to stop triggering.

Take a look at this Complicated scenario:

If you have a Broad keyword, you look at the Search Term Report and it shows this Broad keyword is triggering for a few words.

• It's doing phenomenally well for two keywords
• It's doing horrible for a third keyword. The third keyword is really spending a lot of money and getting no sales.

Action Plan: Negative that bleeding keyword in Broad, but extract it as an Exact and set it at a lower max bid than the cost per click it was being run on.

• This way, you don't affect your broad campaign that's doing well with that one bleeder keyword. You don't have to drop the bid too low on that Broad keyword because it's still going to be getting new sales with that winning keyword.
• And then you've extracted that bleeder keyword, put it in its own Exact campaign, somewhere in the campaign, and then you're bidding on it a little bit less. And then you can keep bidding less and less and less until it's either profitable or it basically hibernates, which means the bid is like 0.1 or 0.01 dollars, where it's like you're not going to get any impressions anyway.

Negative Keyword Match Types

1. Negative exact - negatives exactly that keyword

   • For example: Black jacket
     • It's only not going to trigger for this keyword, black jacket. It's going to trigger everything else.

   

   • When using the exact match type within SB campaigns, our ads will show for similar searches too, not just for the KWs we initially launched. In this case, we can consider adding negatives to improve the campaign's performance.

1. Negative phrase - will negative any keywords that you put in stuck to each other.

   • For example: Black jacket
     • It won't trigger for men's black jacket. It won't trigger for women's black jacket. It won't trigger for large black jacket. It won't trigger for large black jacket men. So as long as these words, black jacket, are next to each other and in that keyword or long tail keyword, it will not trigger.
     • Be very selective when you use a negative phrase. If it's something that you're 100% sure in any variation those keywords will not work for you, sure. And you could do that if you had like an irrelevant keyword that you knew for a fact that any keyword with that phrase in it means it doesn’t belong here, you can do that. Otherwise, just use the Negative Exact to make sure you’re not setting up negatives other keywords you don’t want to negative.
     • When you're discovering blackjacket and it's been doing well. You extract it and you negative it in the broad. You don't want to negative men's blackjacket too because you don't have data on men's blackjacket. You have the data on blackjacket.