Bing Ads Negative Keywords Tutorial

Negative keywords are an important aspect of your Bing Ads search campaigns. You need to add them consistently in order to optimize your campaigns and improve your results. Since you are targeting keywords, you also want to exclude some as well.

You can watch our video below or view it directly on YouTube. The article below will go through the step-by-step process of adding Bing Ads Negative Keywords.

Bing Ads Negative Keywords

 

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What Are Negative Keywords?

You can view our article that answers this question here. Negative keywords are used to exclude certain words or phrases from a search campaign. They can be used in Google Ads or Bing Ads. Keeping up with your negative keyword list is a vital part of campaign optimization. When you add a word like “free” as a negative keyword, then any search query that includes the word “free” will not trigger your advertisement.

How to Add Bing Ads Negative Keywords

You will need a search campaign to get started. You don’t necessarily need to have any data yet, you can add keywords to your negative list as soon as you create your campaign. However, the search terms report is very helpful for finding negative keyword ideas as you gather more data.

1. Sign-in to your Microsoft Advertising account and open your search campaign.
2. Click on the ‘Keywords’ tab to see the keywords you are targeting.
3. Click on the ‘Negative Keywords’ tab or ‘Negative Keyword Lists’ tab.
4. Click on the ‘Add Negative Keywords’ button to start adding phrase match or exact match keywords.

How to Create Campaign Negative Keyword Lists

One popular option in Bing Ads and Google Ads is to create a negative keyword list that you can use for one campaign or multiple campaigns. In the video above, I go over exactly how to manage your lists and add them to a new campaign. Below, there are instructions and screenshots that will be helpful as well.

1. Sign-in to your Microsoft Advertising account.
2. Click on the ‘Shared Library’ link on the left hand side.
3. From the Shared Library page, click on the ‘View Campaign Negative Keywords’ link.
4. Click on the ‘Create negative keyword list’ button to create a new list for your campaign.
5. Click on an existing list to add new negative keywords to a list you have already applied to a campaign.
6. Click on the ‘Add campaigns’ button to apply the list to other campaigns in your account.

Google Ads Negative Keywords

You can find our guide for adding negative keywords in Google Ads here. It is a similar process and you can actually even import your Google Ads negative keyword lists directly into Bing Ads when you import your campaign.
 

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In Summary

Negative keywords are vital when it comes to optimizing your Pay-Per-Click Advertising campaigns. One of the first optimization lessons I learned when I was creating and managing campaigns was how to add negative keywords. Who and what you are targeting is important, and so is who and what you are excluding. Your conversion rate and cost per conversion can improve over time when you have a strong keyword strategy.