Understanding Negative Keyword Match Types is a fundamental concept for effectiver search marketing campaigns. Learn the details of Negative Keyword Match Types and manage your search campaigns more efficiently and effectively.
Negative Keyword Match Types control how your Negative Keywords interact with search terms and decide if an ad will show for a particular search or not.
Take a look at the official Google Ads Support Documentation regarding Negative Keywords for the official info about Negative Keyword Match Types.
Google Ads formats Negative Keyword Match Types the same as with standard Keyword Match Types. Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match.
The difference between Keyword Match Types and Negative Keyword Match Types is that with Negative Keyword Match Types, the terms must exactly match the term excluded.
No close variants, stemmings or expansions as with positive Keyword Match Types.
Google Ads allows you to match with more searches with positive Keyword Match Types, but limits matching to only exact terms with Negative Keyword Match Types.
For a real world example, I want to exclude people looking for products an electrician doesn’t normally offer. Such as night lights. I want to exclude the term night light and related terms from my campaign.
If I exclude just “night light”, that stops only searches that include that exact instance. Misspellings, variant spellings, plural versus singular and other expansions are not excluded regardless of match type.
To address this, it is good practice to exclude all potential spellings, plus singular, plural and possessive variations as makes sense. All of the appropriate close variations you can think of.
If I want to exclude night light from my campaign effectively, I would also include the variations night lights, nightlight, nightlights, nite light, nite lights, nitelight, nitelights, night lite, night lites, nightlite, nightlites, nite lite, nite lites, nitelite and nitelites.
With an understanding of how Negative Keyword Match Types differ from the standard, let’s explore the qualities of each Negative Keyword Match Type.
Here is a simple table that shows different situations where Negative Keyword Match Types block an ad from showing or not with different example search queries.
| Search Term | night lightbroad match negative | “night light”phrase match negative | [night light]phrase match negative |
| night lights | Ad Shows | Ad Shows | Ad Shows |
| light for night time | x | Ad Shows | Ad Shows |
| buy night light | x | x | Ad Shows |
| night light | x | x | x |
Let’s look deeper into the details of each Negative Keyword Match Type:
Broad Match Negative Keywords
Broad Match Type is the default Negative Keyword match type. Uses negative keyword format. No quotes or brackets. For instance, night light.
Blocks exact terms matched in any order. For example light for night time and light up the night.
Can include additional terms.
Phrase Match Negative Keywords
Uses “negative keyword” format. “night light”
Blocks exact terms matched in exact order. For example, buy night light.
Can include additional terms.
Exact Match Negative Keywords
Uses [negative keyword] format. [night light]
Blocks exact terms matched in exact order. In this case only the exact term, night light.
Cannot include additional terms.
When to use each type
If a Negative Keyword is just a single term, it really doesn’t make any difference if you use phrase match or broad match because the order is irrelevant.
For Negative Keywords that are two or more terms, in my experience it is best to just use phrase match.
The order of words in a phrase matters. I like to keep control over that. I don’t want to take the chance of accidentally excluding relevant searches with broad match Negative Keywords.
Some people use broad match Negative Keywords and if that makes sense for your situation and feels right, go ahead and use broad match.
I find that phrase match is the Negative Keyword Match Type that works best for most scenarios in my experience. Phrase match is by far the most common Negative Keyword Match Type.
All of the Negative Keyword Lists we offer are formatted as phrase match Negative Keywords.
Exact Match is used when precision is required. It does get used, but for specific and deliberate situations where phrase match would not be appropriate. For example, a specific term that has a high cost but no conversions over a long period of time.
In the real world, I use exact matches often for specific competitor business names where excluding the phrase match of a word would be too much.
Now that there is an understanding of Negative Keyword Match Types, you can apply this knowledge to your own campaign and effectively use negative keyword match types to exclude irrelevant and low value terms.