You can use negative keywords or keyword phrases to help prevent your ad from being displayed when a search query or other input contains your keywords but is irrelevant to your landing page content.
For step-by-step instructions on adding negative keywords, see this article.
For example, if your ad sells shoes and you have specified wide shoes as a keyword, you can prevent your ad from being displayed in response to a search on women's shoes by using women's shoes as a negative keyword.
The following diagram is an example. On the left are several queries. Now we filter those queries through your negative keyword list. In this case we use just one negative keyword entry: women's shoes. The table shows the result of setting that keyword to either a negative phrase match or an exact match. Using negative phrase match for your negative keyword has a more significant impact on your potential ad displays, with only two of the original four queries being eligible to trigger a display.
ExampleKeyword (broad match): wide shoes
Negative keyword: women's shoes
Search query | Negative EXACT | Negative PHRASE |
---|---|---|
men's wide shoes |
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women's wide shoes |
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women's shoes |
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wide women's shoes |
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= Ad eligible to display
= Ad will not display
There are two negative keyword match types:
Negative phrase matchWith negative phrase match, your ads won't be displayed if the search query contains the exact keywords in the same order, regardless of any additional words or characters present in the search query.
Negative exact matchWith negative exact match, your ads won't be displayed if the search query contains the exact keywords in the same order, so long as no additional words or characters are present in the search query. Please note that your ads may still appear for search queries that include additional words or characters.
You can add negative keywords to:
To answer this, think of the negative keyword process as two steps:
If you bid on a keyword and you have a match (broad, phrase or exact) with the customer's search query or other input, it means your ads are eligible to be displayed and you move to step 2. If there is not a match, stop here. Your ads are not eligible to be displayed.
Microsoft Advertising now takes a look at the search query or other input and compares it to your negative keywords. If there's a match (phrase or exact - depending on what you set up for your negative keywords), that particular keyword is filtered out and your ad will not be eligible for display.
Only the precise negative keyword will be filtered out. Variants (such as plurals, synonyms, and common misspellings of the negative keyword) are not filtered out. To have variants, synonyms, and common misspellings filtered out as well, you will need to enter each one as a separate negative keyword.
We don't support all types of negative keyword variants. See the table below to learn more about how different negative keyword variants will be filtered.
Note: Apostrophes aren't supported in your negative keywords except for 's or 't. For example, women's shoes and don't are supported negative keyword variants.
Additionally, we don't support these symbols or characters in your negative keywords: , . / ; ' [ ] = - \ < > ? : " | + _ ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) ` { } \n \t \r
ExampleKeyword (broad match): wide shoes
Negative keyword: women's shoes
Negative keyword variant provided by advertiser | Variant type | How your negative keyword variant will be filtered |
---|---|---|
women's shoes+ | Symbol or character (+). See above for more information about unsupported symbols and characters. | women's shoes |
Women's shoes | Capitalization | women's shoes |
w-omens shoes | Punctuation within keyword | w omen's shoes |
women's shoess | Misspelling | women's shoess |
For more information, watch our video about negative keywords.