Negative Keywords/Phrases

what is the correct syntax?

[onlineleben]

Sorry to post this maybe dumb question, but it made me sleepless last night:

I tried to increase the quality of visitors that see my ads (and getting a better CTR) by applying negative keywords in the form of
"widget feature1"
"widget feature2" etc. (145 in total)
My keywords were like "widgets color" which is also searched for quite often.
Anyway, my ads didn't show and I had an analysis from within adwords telling me they don't show because of negative keywords.

Now the big question for me is what is the correct syntax for negatives?
Should I include the complete phrase that I want the ad not to show for
or should I only negate the phrase without the main keyword (e.g. -"feature1")?

Any help is much appreciated.

[nakita_dog]

I sometimes do this myself. For example, I want to bid on the following keyword:

wordone wordtwo

I do not want to pay for clicks on the following:
wordtwo wordone

So I make a negative exact match and a negative phrase match:

-"wordtwo wordone"
-[wordtwo wordone]

[RhinoFish]

Great post here to review:

How EXACTLY Do Negative Keywords Work?
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