Negative Targets
Overview
Negative Targeting allows you to define keywords or products that you do not want your ads to be associated with. This can be useful for excluding irrelevant search terms or products from your campaigns.
The point of this is to prevent our ads from being shown to users who are not in the market for our products. This will help us to improve our conversion rates and reduce our ACoS.
Negative Keyword Targeting
Let's say for example that we are selling bicycle chains. Some good negative keywords would be motorcycle, moped, towing, cleaner, lubricant etc. Basically any context where a chain would be involved that is not a bicycle chain, we would want to exclude those items.
Then if we have a keyword target on our ad group for bicycle chain, and a negative keyword lubricant, we would not match with a user who searched for bicycle chain lubricant.
Negative Product Targeting
Negative product targeting is extremely similar, except instead of defining keywords, we choose products and brands that we do not want to be associated with.
While it can be more tedious to define negative products, for some ad groups it is all that is available. Additionally it is possible to negatively target a brand, which can then negatively target a whole swath of products.
If negative keyword targeting is not available for your ad group, it may be available for the campaign that contains the ad group.
Availability
Negative Targeting is not available for all ad types, and within the ad types where it is available, not all types of negative targeting are available in all locations.
Negative Targeting is available for the following ad types:
| Ad Type | Negative Targeting |
|---|---|
| Sponsored Products | ✔ |
| Sponsored Brands | ✔ |
| Sponsored Display | ❌ |
Within those ad types, certain types of negative targets are only available in certain places.
Campaign Negative Targeting
Within Sponsored Products, for manual campaigns, you can only add negative keywords at the campaign level. However for auto campaigns, you can add both negative keywords and negative products.
For Sponsored Brands, you cannot add any negative targets at the campaign level at all.
| Campaign Type | Negative Keywords | Negative Products |
|---|---|---|
| Sponsored Products (Manual) | ✔ | ❌ |
| Sponsored Products (Auto) | ✔ | ✔ |
| Sponsored Brands (Manual) | ❌ | ❌ |
Ad Group Negative Targeting
And then within ad groups, depending on the targeting type, you may be able to add negative keywords, negative products or both.
| Ad Group Targeting Type | Negative Keywords | Negative Products |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword Targeting | ✔ | ❌ |
| Product Targeting | ❌ | ✔ |
| Auto Targeting | ✔ | ✔ |