Exclude Keywords With Negative Keyword Targeting

Use them when:

• You have identified terms driving poor-quality traffic: clicks that do not convert, or searches that clearly mean something else.

• You need brand safety. Some terms you do not want your products beside.

• Your line items are competing with each other. Negatives on overlapping terms stop that.

• You are running conquesting and want to exclude sister brands. Our system does not detect that two brands share a parent company, so those terms need negating manually.

Who benefits most: advertisers managing several campaigns at scale, where a small amount of wasted spend repeats across many line items.

Who can skip it: if the automatic keywords already align closely with what you sell, negative keywords add little. Do not build a negative keyword list unless you have a specific reason to.

Negative keywords are set at line item level, in Step 2 of the line item creation or editing workflow.

1. Go to Step 2 of the workflow.

2. Scroll below the Keyword Targeting Strategy section to Negative Keywords.

3. Enter the terms you want to exclude, one keyword or keyword string per row.

4. Add them to the Broad Match box, the Exact Match box, or both. Negative keywords have two boxes, one per match type.

Negative keywords use one of two match types, and their reach differs.

Worked example: "men's shoes" as a negative keyword

A broad match negative blocks search terms that contain your keyword, including when extra words are added before or after it. That is why "blue men's shoes" and "men's shoe size 9" are both blocked. It is not a simple "contains both words" rule, though. A term that splits your keyword with another word, such as "men's basketball shoes", or that drops part of it, such as "boy's shoes", can still serve.

When you are unsure how far a broad match negative reaches, use the examples above as your guide rather than a strict rule, and check what the term is actually blocking after you add it.

Both match types include stemmed variations of your keyword, so one negative covers a set of forms.

A negative keyword on jean also blocks jean, jeans, and jean's. The same applies to variations in special characters, word order, and spacing.

Stemming has two effects. It saves you from listing every plural and apostrophe form yourself. It also makes a negative keyword broader than it looks on the page, so check what a term stems to before you add it.

To learn more, please see How Keyword Targeting Works in Sponsored Products for the full stemming behavior.

A negative keyword applies to all products in the line item. You cannot negate a term for only some of them.

If you want to block a term for some products but keep it for others, put those products in their own line item and add the negative there.

This is the same rule that governs submitted keywords. We recommend keeping line items to a single product category, because mixed-category line items make both positive and negative keyword management harder.

• Enter one keyword or keyword string per row.

• Keywords are not case-sensitive.

• Duplicate entries are de-duplicated automatically.

• Special characters are permitted, but may be parsed automatically.

• Up to 1,000 broad match and 1,000 exact match negative keywords per line item. The two allowances are separate, and both are separate from your submitted keyword allowance.

• There is no reason to enter the same keyword in both boxes. A keyword entered under both Broad Match and Exact Match behaves as a broad match keyword, and broad match already covers the exact term. Enter it once, under Broad Match.