Microsoft Ads Negative Keyword Lists

Key Takeaways

negative keywords are a cornerstone of pretty much any PBC search campaign strategy we always want to make sure that our campaigns are showing up for the most relevant search queries out there otherwise doesn't make any sense to advertise that's where negative keywords come in the problem is when you have either a really high volume account or some campaigns that have been running for a really long time and have huge lists of negative keywords applied it can become really hard to start applying those two new campaigns or making sure that everything is consistent across all the campaigns you have in the account that's where negative keyword lists can come in so today what I want to talk about is where negative keyword lists live in Microsoft Ads how you can apply them to campaigns how you can make changes to them and a couple of caveats to think about whenever you're adding negative keywords let's hop in this video is brought to you by shape an all-in-one PPC budgeting solution designed for you to control organize and collaborate on PPC ad spend at scale ready to start saving some time check out the link below to learn all about shape in your Microsoft Ads account negative keyword lists live in the shared library over here on the left you can then scroll down and see campaign negative keywords so let's click on view campaign negative keywords and here we're going to come to the manager of our negative keyword lists you can see that we've already got one list in here but I'm gonna start off by creating a new one if you just click the green button you can create a new negative keyword list you simply need to give it a name and then in the box below you can add any of the negative keywords that you want to live in this list the only thing to note is that you want to make sure that you honor the match types by using the brackets or quotation marks for exact and phrase match respectively so let's say in this example I just want to make sure that anything that comes through with free and sample are excluded from the campaign's just be sure you add one new negative keyword per line and then hit safe and now you can see there are new negative keyword list is in place we can then apply it to campaigns directly from this manager by clicking the check box next to it come up to add to campaigns and then you'll see all the campaigns that are currently in the account right now we only have five campaigns but if you had a lot of campaigns that scrolled beyond the view that you can see here you can use this search function up here at the top where you can see the cursor is blinking but for just sake of ease I want click the select all and add all the campaigns into this negative keyword list then I'm gonna click Save and now you can see that in this manager you can see that we've got our new keyword list it's added to five campaigns that's how many are sharing the list and you can see the number of negative keywords that are in the list this one only has two because I added free and sample if we want to go in and add new keywords to our list later on you can simply click the blue name of the list it'll open up this new editor where you can see two separate sections first are the negative keywords themselves along with their match type as well as the campaigns that it's associated with so if you want to just take it off of one campaign you can easily just check the box next to it and click remove it'll then ask you if you're sure and now it's been removed from one campaign you can also add new negative keywords by simply clicking the button up here and then you'll be brought back to that same editor that we saw before where we can add new negative keywords if you're in the campaigns manager and you're unsure as to which negative keyword lists are added to your campaigns you can simply go into the campaign itself come over to the keywords tab and here you'll see that there is a keywords option negative keywords option which are applied to the campaign itself and there's a separate box for negative keyword lists you can click on that and now you can see the keyword lists that are associated with this campaign again if you want to remove any of them you can simply check the box next to it and click remove or if there were additional negative keyword lists in this account that weren't applied here you can click add negative keyword lists choose the list that you want to apply and then hit save the only limitation with negative keyword lists and Microsoft Ads comes from when you are adding negative keywords to the list itself when you're in your search terms report and you want to add a negative keyword you can click the check box next to it and click Add as negative keywords you'll see here that there are only two options ad as ad group or campaign level negative keyword there is not an option to add it at the negative keyword list level in Microsoft ads in the same way that there is in Google Ads so keep this in mind when you're trying to build your negative keyword lists maybe you start to see something show up in your search terms report that you want to add to those lists you're gonna need to make a note of it or export the list in some way and then manually add it to your negative keyword lists by adding it in the shared library that we navigated - before thanks for watching our video make sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel to see more videos