How to create a Negative Keyword list

Last week Yahoo posted a blog about how using the negative keywords helps increase relevance. Where they did provide a list of steps, I thought I’d take that a bit further and outline the steps for each of the three major PPC providers.

Google AdWords
Quite often you will want to create a negative keyword list that applies to your entire campaign, rather than creating individual lists for each ad group. Google makes this easy by following these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Click the campaign you wish to edit.
3. The number of existing campaign negative keywords will appear beneath the campaign name and daily budget.
4. If no campaign negative keywords exist for your campaign, click Add. Otherwise, click edit.
5. You may select and enter negative keywords for your campaign in one of two ways:

You will find at other times you do want more control over the negatives, and Google again makes it easy to apply negative keywords at the ad group level by following these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Select the campaign and the ad group that you’d like to edit.
3. Select the Keywords tab.
4. Click Edit keywords, above the keyword table.
5. Add your negative keywords, one per line. Make sure to put a negative sign (–) before each keyword (e.g., –free).
6. Click Save Changes.

If you’re editing your accounts using AdWords Editor, then things are even a little easier.

1. In the Account column, select the campaign or ad group.
2. Select the Negatives tab.
3. For a single negative keyword, click the Add Negative and select the type of negative you wish to add
4. For a group, or list of multiple negative terms, click on Make Multiple Changes and select the type of change you’d like to make

Yahoo! Search Marketing

1. Sign in to your account
2. Go to your Ad Group Settings page.
3. Click on “Tactic Settings.”
4. On the “Tactic Settings” page the “Excluded Words” feature is displayed.
5. Click on “Excluded Words” to open the entry field.
6. Add your excluded words but do not to use any commas or semicolons after each word.
7. Click “Save Changes,” to process the Excluded Words list.

MSN adCenter

1. On the Keywords page, in the keyword entry box, type each keyword on a new line.
2. Click Add to Keywords List.
3. In the Negative keywords column, type negative keywords for each keyword.
4. To save your negative keywords, click Continue.