Negative keywords are words that you don’t want your ad showing up for. These are used in keyword advertising to prevent PPC ads from being shown when the search terms contain the negative keywords.When you are running a Google AdWords campaign, it is crucial to include negative keywords.

By typing in a dash or minus sign in front of keyword (”-keyword”), you can prevent searchers who types in the keywords containing that word.

For example,

1. If a realtor who sells houses in New York could specify “-commercial” as a negative keyword so that their ads do show for searches upon “New York real estate” but not “New York commercial real estate”.

Similarly,

2. For “childrens books” good negative keywords may be:
-author name (if you don’t sell that author’s books)
-personalized (if you don’t sell personalized books)
-free (if you don’t give them away!)
etc.

You can also do matching in brackets, e.g. [childrens books]. This means that your ad will only show for this phrase.

Use:

You should consider the use of negative keywords if some of the keywords or keyword phrases in your campaign are broad and generic and if there is the possibility of a double meaning.If you’ve done your research right and write the correct ad then you might only need a small handful of negatives in each ad group.

By using negative keywords you will reduce the number of click-throughs that would not convert to sales anyway. In addition to that - the overall CTR of your ad (click through rate) will be much higher because there will now be a smaller number of Internet users be viewing your ad but not clicking. The higher CTR will cause the ad to receive a higher position without the need to work with higher CPC (cost per click) bids.

You can add naegative keywords at Ad group as wll as Campaign level.

In Ad group:

Firstly you have to sign in your AdWords account https://adwords.google.com
# Now,Select the campaign and the ad group that you’d like to edit.
# Select the Keywords tab.
# Click Edit keywords, above the keyword table.
# Add your negative keywords, one per line. Make sure to put a negative sign (–) before each keyword (e.g., –free).
# Click Save Changes.

Campaign Level:

Adding a negative keyword at the campaign level means that all the ads in the campaign will not show for search queries containing that term. To add and edit negative keywords at the campaign level, use your Edit Campaign Negative Keywords Tool

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