Which level should I apply negative keywords to? Account, Campaign, or Ad Group level?

As with anything in life, there is time and place for everything.  (Well maybe not EVERYTHING, but you know what I mean….)

First off, What are negative keywords?

Negative keywords are the inputs that tell Google Ads what queries we do NOT want ads to show for.  Although we’d love to believe the AI will simply know ahead of time which searchers will be irrelevant or non profitable, the system is specifically designed to allow you, as the advertiser, to ensure Google does not show your ads for non profitable “clickers”.

Now you can argue that modern day negative keyword application in an account does NOT eliminate bad clickers, or irrelevant clicks completely, but at the least, it WILL mitigate the % of traffic from low quality or irrelevant clicks.

But alas, not all negative keywords are made the same.

Sometimes you will want that negative keyword to apply across the entire account, and so you will want to apply that negative to your account wide “negative keyword list”.

Other times, you might only want that negative keyword applied to a specific campaign.  This is when you find that certain campaigns are “broad matching” to potentially related topics to your business, but not to the topic within THAT campaign.  However, you have specific campaigns you do not want to block that query within, so you pick and choose which campaigns to apply that negative to.

For example, if you are a personal injury attorney, you might have campaigns as follows:

1/ MVA

2/ Premises Liability

3/ Dog Bite

So you wouldn’t want “dog bite attorney” to come up as a query within your premises campaign, because you want those users to see the ad copy and landing pages you’ve tailored to dog bite.  Therefore you put “dog bite” as a negative keyword within premises and MVA campaigns.  (Campaign Level Negatives)

Taking it a step further if you are obsessive with segmentation like we are here at HOP2THETOP.  Within your dog bite campaign, you might not want the keyword “dog bite attorney” for example, to trigger ads tailored towards “dog bite compensation”.  So you could put “dog bite attorney” as a negative within the “dog bite compensation” ad group.  This prevents what we call “cross matching” within ad groups.  Or in layman’s terms “competing with yourself”.

So where you apply the negative, and what negative you apply depends on the matching strategy.  What ad do you want to come up for which query?  You see, the system will completely screw up matching queries to ads, and thus throwing off the user experience and hurting your quality score.  Yes, the system will automatically mismatch queries, and undermine the scoring from it’s own system.  Makes a ton of sense, right?  Hey, we didn’t program the system so don’t look at us!

So this is why having an aggressive negative keyword strategy is critical to a successful PPC effort.  And this is why at HOP2THETOP we consider negative keywords a fundamental of PPC campaign management that has to happen in all accounts, on an ongoing basis.