Negative keyword management

Negative keywords are the pruning side of campaign maintenance. They prevent irrelevant clicks from burning budget, stop auto and broad campaigns from competing with your precision exact-match campaigns, and keep your bid signals clean. Without an active negation practice, your campaigns cannibalize each other and your data becomes unreadable.

Negative Exact vs Negative Phrase

Two types of negatives, two different jobs:

Negative Exact blocks only the precise query. Use for:

• Graduated terms — keywords you've promoted from auto/broad campaigns to dedicated exact-match campaigns. The source campaign should stop bidding on them.
• Specific non-converting queries — a particular search term that generated clicks but no purchases over a 14-30 day window.

Negative Phrase blocks any query containing the phrase. Use for:

• Your own brand name — prevents auto campaigns from spending on branded queries that would convert organically anyway
• Competitor brand names — prevents your auto campaigns from bidding on competitor branded terms (low conversion, high waste)
• Irrelevant root keywords — broad category terms that are clearly wrong for your product (e.g., "dog" negated from a cat product campaign)

Negation rules by campaign type

Not every campaign type needs the same negatives. Here's the breakdown:

Auto — Close Match:

• Exact-negate all keywords you're already targeting in manual campaigns (prevents cannibalization)
• Phrase-negate your own brand name
• Phrase-negate competitor brand names
• Phrase-negate irrelevant root keywords

Auto — Loose Match:

• Exact-negate all ASINs you're already targeting in manual product targeting campaigns
• Phrase-negate your own brand name
• Phrase-negate competitor brand names
• Phrase-negate irrelevant root keywords

Auto — Substitutes:

• Exact-negate all ASINs targeted in other campaigns
• Exact-negate your own brand's ASINs
• Exact-negate irrelevant ASINs (products clearly outside your category)

Auto — Complements:

• Same negation rules as Substitutes

Manual Broad and Broad Modified:

• Phrase-negate your own brand name
• Phrase-negate competitor brand names
• Phrase-negate irrelevant root keywords

Manual Exact and Single Keyword:

• No negatives needed — targeting is already precise

Ranking Broad:

• Same negatives as Manual Broad

The graduation workflow

Graduation and negation are two sides of the same action. When you graduate a converting term from an auto or broad campaign to a dedicated exact-match campaign, you must also add that term as a Negative Exact in the source campaign. Without this step, both campaigns bid on the same query — you compete against yourself in the auction, inflating your own CPC and splitting attribution.

The full graduation process is covered in The keyword harvesting loop. The negation step is the part most sellers skip, and it's the most important one.

Campaign-level vs ad-group-level

Campaign-level negatives apply to all ad groups within the campaign. For most sellers, this is sufficient — especially when each campaign has a single ad group (which is the recommended structure for clarity).

Ad-group-level negatives only apply to that specific ad group. They're useful when a single campaign contains multiple ad groups targeting different keyword themes and you need to prevent overlap between those themes without blocking them account-wide.

Default to campaign-level. Only use ad-group-level when you have a specific reason.

When to prune

Run the pruning routine weekly alongside your keyword harvesting:

1. Pull the Search Term Report for the last 7-14 days
2. Filter for customer search terms with clicks but zero purchases
3. Check the spend — terms with significant spend and no conversions are priority negatives
4. Add each qualifying term as Negative Exact in the source campaign
5. For terms that represent an entire category of irrelevance (not just one query), use Negative Phrase instead to block the whole family

A term with 2-3 clicks and no purchases over 7 days may just need more data. A term with 15 or more clicks and no purchases over 14 days is almost certainly waste — negate it.