How many negatives do you have?

Is it bad to have too many negatives keywords

[TinkyWinky]

Following on from this thread [webmasterworld.com ]

I have approximately 1300 negative keywords - is this bad?

How many do others have - am I being too restrictive maybe?

[justshelley]

You beat me. I think the most I have in one campaign is 700. ;) If my campaign is not sexually oriented but uses search terms that are slang for sex acts or body parts…it will take hundreds of terms to filter out the unwanted, sexually oriented traffic.

You have to be really careful, especially if you are doing the campaign for someone else. If that's the case, run the negatives by them to make sure you didn't put any on the list that will inadvertently filter out “good” traffic.

Overall though, I get much better CTR’s and results when the negative terms are doing their job and filtering out unwanted impressions and click throughs.

[caspernova]

How do you figure out what negative keywords you shoudl have? You can't tell what people are typing in when they search, you can only really figure out that it contains your keywords, right?

[justshelley]

I find my negative terms when I'm doing my keyword research. If I'm doing keyword research on "dodge trucks" and I see the words old, restaurant, jim's, etc. coming up in my search results then I know that I need to add those words as negative terms because those searches are not going to help me sell dodge trucks.

I use a spreadsheet when I do keyword research. As I come up with keywords, I will put them into columns/categories. For example, I might have a category for colors, styles, locations and another category for negative terms.

Sometimes negative terms are only relevant to a specific category so those negative terms will be added only to that specific AdGroup when I set it up. Many of the keywords will apply to all the categories and those will be campaign specific negative terms.

[eWhisper]

How do you figure out what negative keywords you shoudl have? You can't tell what people are typing in when they search, you can only really figure out that it contains your keywords, right?

Finding negative keywords:
[webmasterworld.com...]