Add negative keywords
Add negative keywords
Help prevent your ads from being displayed with negative keywords in Microsoft Advertising Editor.
Negative keywords are a great way to help prevent your ads from being displayed when a search query contains your keywords but is not relevant to your landing page content.
Campaign-level keywords apply to all keywords in a campaign. Negative keywords assigned at the campaign level will also be applied at the ad group level (in addition to any ad group-specific negative keywords).
Add a single negative keyword
- Select the campaign or ad group from the tree view in the left pane.
- Select Negative Keywords under Keywords and targeting from the type list in the left pane.
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In the data view, click Add negative keyword and select Add ad group negative keyword or Add campaign negative keyword.
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Type your negative keyword in the edit pane and select a match type.
Note
Do not type a minus sign (-) before negative keywords.
Add multiple negative keyword
- Select the campaign or ad group from the tree view in the left pane.
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Select Negative Keywords under Keywords and targeting from the type list in the left pane.
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In the data view, click Make multiple changes and then select Add/update multiple ad group negative keywords or Add/update multiple campaign negative keywords.
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In the Make multiple Changes dialog box, do one of the following:
- If you are going to paste in a list that includes campaign and ad group names, check the My negative keyword data includes campaign and ad group names.
- If you are going to paste in a list that does not contain campaign and ad group names, uncheck My negative keyword data includes campaign and ad group names.
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Under Select location, select the campaigns or ad groups that you want to add negative keywords to.
- Click Insert headings.
- In the text box, type the data for one ad per line, in the order indicated by the headings.
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Click Next.
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Select the appropriate column headings in each of the drop-down boxes and click Import.
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On the Import Completed page, after you review your changes, select Close.
Notes
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Microsoft Advertising does not support keyword-level negative keywords. If you're using third-party or custom applications to add negative keywords, those applications might allow you to enter keyword-level negative keywords. However, Microsoft Advertising will not use them when filtering queries. It is therefore important that you avoid using keyword-level negative keywords and instead add those negative keywords to the ad group or campaign level.
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Microsoft Advertising Editor users must be running version 8.1 or later to use exact match negative keywords. Users of earlier versions are limited to phrase match.
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To activate changes that you make in Microsoft Advertising Editor, you must post them to your Microsoft Advertising account.