An Insight Into: Google Ads New Account-Level Negative Keyword Feature

Author: Myk Baxter

Google Ads has just launched account-level negative keywords worldwide, granting advertisers and marketers greater control over brand safety and suitability. 

The feature, which was first announced in 2022 and has been under testing for many months, allows advertising specialists to add keywords to exclude traffic from all Google search and shopping campaigns, alongside the search and shopping of Performance Max.

Granting greater brand safety and suitability, users can access the feature from their account settings page to ensure their ad campaigns meet their brand values and target audience.

Brands will benefit from this greatly should they want to avoid featuring in contexts that may be deemed inappropriate or damaging to their reputation.  

Alongside brand safety benefits, the introduction of account-level negative keywords makes the campaign management process a better one for advertisers.

Rather than adding negative keywords to individual campaigns, advertisers can effectively control them at the account level, allowing time to be spent on other areas and reducing the chance of any human error. 

Managers no longer need to think about duplicated negative keywords across multiple campaigns and missing anything vital to your brand safety. 

Furthermore, account-level negative keywords can enhance the accuracy of ad targeting by avoiding any irrelevant or low-performing keywords that could decrease your campaign performance. Overall, resulting in higher-quality user traffic and a greater ROI (return on investment). 

Google Ads already offers a range of brand suitability controls including; inventory types, digital content labels, placement exclusions, and negative keywords at the campaign level.

Google Ad liaisons have noted that they are expanding account-level negative keywords to address various use cases and that they will share more with managers soon.

This new rollout is vital in giving brands more access and control over their advertising, allowing them to use their campaigns to target the appropriate audience.

Thanks for reading,

Myk Baxter, eCommerce Consultant