webdiversity - 9:37 am on Jun 1, 2003 (gmt 0)

Negative keywords should be used where there is the possibility of a double meaning.

A lot of people are looking for reviews of products so they often type in "blue widget review". If your site does that sort of thing then great, if not then use -review as a negative. If you sell luxury goods then use words like -cheap.

I've seen too many people get way too specific and they end up with one or two generic keywords and hundreds of negatives in their ad group. I think if you've done your research right and write the correct ad then you might only need a small handful of negatives in each ad group.

Searchers are getting more and more lazy. We're finding more and more of the transactions we want to see are taking place higher up the food chain than when you had to be really specific to find what you were looking for. What we find is the more negative keywords you use (instead of exact match), the more you potentially hamper the likely success of the buyers picking you as opposed to the competition.