In January, Google announced it had begun rolling out account-level negative keywords in Google Ads. Negative keywords are great for ensuring that your brand or client does not show ads alongside searches that may not be relevant to what you’re offering or may not be considered safe for your brand. Previously, negative keywords had to be added at the campaign level, meaning you had to go into each individual campaign in order to create a list of negative keywords. This left room for potentially missing certain keywords that were intended to be negative across all campaigns, and the process was also quite time-consuming. Account-level negative keywords should solve both of those problems.

With the addition of account-level negative keywords, you may be wondering how to use this new feature. To add your list of negative keywords at the account level in the Google Ads interface, navigate to “Settings” and select “Account Settings.” Once you’re in the account settings, you’ll be able to add your negative keyword list. You can also determine whether you would like the negative keywords to be broad match, phrase match or exact match. The negative keywords you add may be applied to Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, allowing for the potential of driving higher-quality traffic for your brand or client.

Account-level negative keywords are a great option if you’re looking to keep all your ads from showing alongside unrelated searches or those that aren’t brand-safe. If your negative keywords vary by offering, you can always use campaign-level negative keywords to ensure that your ads from other campaigns still trigger for the negative keywords you apply to a certain campaign. For example, if you’re running ads for a clothing brand and you don’t want the ads in your formalwear campaign to show when someone is searching for casualwear, you can add negative keywords, such as “casual clothing” or “active wear,” to keep your ads from triggering when a search for one of those keywords takes place. This will not affect the ads in your casualwear campaigns.

Overall, having the option to add negative keywords at the account level will likely save you valuable time and leave less room for missing negative keywords across campaigns. Account-level negative keywords also give advertisers more control over where their ads are showing and increase the likelihood of a better return on investment, as their ads are appearing for more relevant searches. The addition of this feature is a massive win for the pay-per-click community. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to start drafting my own account-level negative keyword list!