Negative keywords in Google ads help to make your campaigns more targeted and consolidated for those who view the ad. It is a marketing technique that is used to make sure that your targeted audience is able to reach your business easily when they search for a particular item in the search bar. When it comes to designing a robust ad campaign, the approach here is to include at least a certain number of negative keywords so that your campaign is more streamlined.  To understand more on how to do this, we must first understand what are the different kind of negative keywords that can be used in an ad campaign.

Different Types of Negative Keywords

Just as we have mentioned before, a negative keyword is added to an ad campaign so that it does not show up on a page where the topic is not relevant. There are three types of negative keywords in Google ads:

• Negative broad match: When adding negative keywords to the ads, the ad won’t show even if the search query contains all the negative keywords. This includes the order of the keywords as well. For example, if you are searching for ‘women’s blue jeans’ and the negative broad match keyword is ‘women’s jeans’, then the ad will not show up. 
• Negative phrase match: Here the order of the keywords matter. The ad you designed won’t show if the customer searches for the the exact phrase in the same order. There could be additional keywords in the search query but it won’t matter as long as the keyword phrase is displayed in the same order.
• Negative exact search: Here the exact keyword matters. The ad won’t show if the customer searches for the exact words in the same order. However, it will show if there are additional words. For example, for a negative keyword like ‘woman’s blue jeans’, the ad will still show up for a search query such as ‘women’s blue jeans in small size’.

Optimizing the Negative Keywords

Google Ads negative keywords are important because if the ad campaign is not designed well, it can ultimately cost a lot of money and affect your PPC strategy. It helps to optimize the mist of negative keywords regularly so that irrelevant search terms don’t trigger your ads unnecessarily. These can be achieved in multiple methods:

1. Run a search query report regularly so you can check the conversion rates of your ad campaigns.
2. Employ the use of keyword tools that can keep track of the master list of keywords that you use.
3. Depending on the ad-campaign you are running, either video or display or campaign, there is usually a limit to the number of negatives you can use for them. Ensure you do not go over the limit, else Google will ignore any negative keyword added after that. 
4. When using negative keywords, you need to reduce the length and the number of keywords you use by using a method known as the lowest common denominator method.

What Exactly is the Lowest Common Denominator Method?

Simply put, this method helps you optimize negative keywords by shortening the length of the negative keywords that you use. When looking into ad spend during a PPC account audit, the number one mistake made by most users is that they use broad negative keyword matches. For example, if you are selling luxury handmade watches, then adding negative keywords like ‘cheap’ or ‘low-end’ makes sense. However, if you were to add the phrase ‘cheap handmade watches’ to the negative keyword list, then this would exclude your ads from being shown for someone searching for ‘handmade watches’. This can cause a lot of waste of time and money. A regular PPC account audit will be able to show you how a non-optimized negative keyword selection can impact your PPC campaigns.

Benefits of Maintaining Negative Keywords

Google ads negative keywords form an important part of PPC strategy and can help manage the type of traffic you want. Maintaining these words can help you many ways:

• By using tactics like the lowest common denominator method can help you spend less time adding unnecessary and redundant words to the keyword lists.
• It helps you save money. A lot of cash goes into creating these campaigns and if the ads are not targeted as intended, it can be a waste of resources.
• Optimization is also key to your ads performing better. 

Also read: How Do Smart Shopping Campaigns Work to Maximize Conversion Value?