#3 — Reviewing and Adding/Removing Negative Keywords
There are two key areas of search marketing optimization when it comes to negative keywords. Adding and Removing.
Adding negative keywords is pretty straightforward, with every keyword you bid on there are dozens of variations that you would not want to pay for. For example, your company may want to bid on the term “auto repair” but you probably don’t want to show up and pay for a click when people search for “windows 10 auto repair loop”.
Adding negative keywords is also helpful for sculpting the structure of your campaigns. If you have an ad group specifically targeting a certain set of keywords, with dedicated ad text, and a dedicated landing page, you can add those keywords as negatives to your other campaigns and ad groups to make sure that the wrong ad doesn’t accidentally show up in front of your potential customer.
With Google, one of the best ways to see what negative keywords you will want to add, check the “Search terms” section under your keywords tab.
I do recommend keeping a running list of common negatives. That way, every time you launch a new campaign or ad group, you can automatically ad the default list of negative keywords to your campaign.
However, sometimes this blanket approach can lead to keyword conflicts, which is why the second part of the review is to check and remove any negative keywords that could accidentally be stopping your targeted ads from showing. A quick check through the negative keyword lists can clean up any kind of confusion that could be sending Google the wrong signal.