Negative Keywords for Product Listing Ads

When we launched Product Listing Ads to all U.S. advertisers last year we also launched a new bidding and targeting technology, Product Targets. This feature allows you to bucket the items in your merchant center account into manageable groups, and to bid differently on those groups based on a number of attributes like brand and product type.

Since we launched we’ve been working on new targeting features to help you improve your performance with Product Listing Ads even further. Today, we’re announcing the launch of one of these features - negative keywords.

Negative keywords for Product Listing Ads work just like they do with normal text-based search ads. Adding a negative keyword to your ad group or campaign means that your product listing ads won't show for search queries containing that term.

Using negative keywords, you can limit the chances that your ads will show on unrelated, or low value queries. For example, if you sell sheet sets, but you don’t carry twin sizes, you can add the negative keyword [-twin] to your Ad Group and your Product Listing Ads won’t show for any queries that contain the word [twin].

You can also manage negative keywords across multiple campaigns using the negative keyword list feature that we introduced earlier this year.

Negative keyword functionality for Product Listing Ads is available now to all U.S. advertisers. To learn more about Product Listing Ads, including best practices, visit our help center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew