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Poll: How Important Is It To Keep Adding Negative Keywords To a Campaign Periodically (Not just in the first weeks)?
Posted by on August 11, 2021 at 6:08 pmI’d like to find out what importance you guys attach to adding negative keywords on an ongoing basis, like… not just at the beginning and in the first few weeks of a campaign, but ongoingly and periodically add new negative keywords as you find them in the search terms, even months later.
[View Poll](https://www.reddit.com/poll/p2ilcz)
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12 Replies
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Negative keywords improve targeting. Improving targeting improves results including conversion. It’s the most important thing you can do to improve performance.
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Search trends can change over time. So you need to stay on top of it to make sure your targeting remains relevant by adding negative keywords.
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Well, how important is it to not waste money?
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I think its probably overrated. Yeah, there’s going to be some clearly wasted spend that you want to eliminate. But I’ve seen lots of people go too heavy, and inadvertently eliminate traffic that they didn’t mean to (and once its gone, its very hard to realize what’s missing), or people make assumptions about what’s not going to convert when it actually will.
Edit: like everything, it will depend a lot on the industry, margins/value, and goals for the campaign (top of funnel vs bottom). -
Depends entirely on your keywords and the account structure, spend, etc, tbh.
Limited, exact match keywords in a niche audience? You probably see diminishing returns pretty quickly and your time is better spent elsewhere after you’ve filtered out the main problem searches. You should still pop in occasionally but you don’t have to watch it like a hawk.
Broad match keywords, pretty generic terms and/or brand category, lots of superfluous search queries? Yeah, neg keywords should probably always be part of the daily/weekly/monthly check-list.
There’s only a limited amount of time to dedicate on the account (either limited by spend and/or just hours in the day) so you have to prioritize what’s going to get the highest ROI. But, generally, not showing ads on irrelevant queries is…a pretty high ROI thing to do.
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You have to, but you also can strangle an account with the wrong negatives.
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Easily one of the most important tasks. Though as others have mentioned, it’s possible to go overboard.
After running a campaign for a long time, it can be interesting to test a new campaign using broad keywords and smart bidding with no negative keywords (or at least very minimal ones). Sometimes you’ll discover that a negative keyword you added years ago was actually blocking a search query that ends up converting well.
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The poll itself is nonsensical because it really depends on the use case.
For example if you have an account with very broad and vague keywords then you’ll probably want to be adding more negative keywords because you’ll get all sorts of search queries triggering your ads, if however you’ve got highly specific keywords it might be that you don’t need many negative keywords if any.
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We run a few broad match campaigns
I look at search terms weekly and add a few negatives every week.
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I barely have negative keywords. I’m using broad keywords but most search terms have only a few impressions and barely clicks. So can’t really exclude them without more data
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It depends.
I have some ad groups and campaigns that almost never require negative keywords because the keywords are exact match and carefully chosen.
Others are more exploratory and require a lot of negatives. Using broad keywords? Going to need to add negatives regularly.
I work with nonprofits, and for every ad using the keyword **donate** I have to add negatives for blood, toys, body, furniture, competitors’ names and a long list of other things.
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Depends whether you are using automated bidding strategies. In that case, It can be rather contraproductive.
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