How to deal with negative keywords?

Having an effective negative keyword strategy is one of the cornerstones of a successful PPC account. Negative keywords, implemented correctly will save you money, increase the relevancy of your audience and improve your click-through rates. I am going to highlight some tips when working with negative keywords. Hopefully those of you new to the PPC industry will find some benefit in reviewing these tips. They should also serve as a good refresher for more experienced managers.
1. Distinguish between Campaign and Ad Group level negatives: You can add keywords into your account at either the campaign or ad group level. Knowing where to place them is a key part of having an effective negative strategy. Broad sweeping terms for products or items you don’t sell will probably want to be added in as campaign negatives.
2. Run regular SQRs: SQR is a slightly dated term from when you actually had to run Search Query Reports in AdWords. Nowadays this information can be found in the ‘Keyword details’ menu in your keyword report. The SQR is the bread and butter of your negative keyword strategy – it tells you the exact terms searched for which have caused your ads to show. From this you can directly see which terms your ads are showing for, but that aren’t relevant to your business.
3. Don’t add too many at once: This applies particularly for large accounts where it makes sense to do huge SQR audits and bulk negative keyword uploads. f your account tanks, you will find it hard to pinpoint exactly which negative keywords caused the issue and will have to take them all out again.
4. Be smart with your negative keywords: As with regular keywords, negative keywords have match types. Make sure you know when you want to get rid of a very specific query with a negative exact, and when you are looking to remove anything surrounding a specific term with negative phrase or broad.