Estimate the impact of adding negative keywords to your Performance Max campaign

You can use negative keywords to help stop your Performance Max campaigns from serving for search queries that contain excluded terms on Search and Shopping inventory. In some cases, however, adding negative keywords can unexpectedly limit your reach, and result in missed opportunities for valuable conversions. Learn more about Negative keywords in Performance Max campaigns.

This article explains how to preview the potential impact of adding specific negative keywords to your campaigns in Google Ads.

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Benefits

  • Understand the potential impact of adding specific negative keywords to your campaign
  • Refine inputs to achieve your marketing objective

How to estimate the impact of adding negative keywords to your Performance Max campaign

Follow the steps below to preview the impact of specific negative keywords on your campaigns.

  1. Go to Search Keywords within the Campaigns menu Campaigns Icon.
  2. Select the plus button to add new keywords.
    • Note: You can preview impact for up to 10 keywords at a time.
  3. Add one keyword per line.
  4. Select Preview impact.
  5. Based on the predicted impact, you may wish to adjust your negative keywords before adding them to your campaign.
Tip: This feature can also be used for existing keywords in your Performance Max campaigns.

Frequently asked questions

What campaign types is impact prediction available in?

Negative keyword impact prediction is only available for Performance Max campaigns, but may roll out to other campaign types and targeting features in the future.

What inventories does impact prediction apply to?

This impact prediction applies to Search and Shopping (the same inventories negative keywords apply to).

What information is shown in terms of predicted impact?

Predicted impact is shown as a percentage and includes the projected impact to conversions or conversions value, depending on your bid strategy.

Example

If a negative keyword you’ve added shows -10% conversion loss, this means that if your campaign previously got 100 conversions/day, adding this negative keyword would likely result in only 90 conversions/day.

What should I do with the results I find from impact prediction?

What you do with this information depends on the predicted outcome and your marketing objective, but it can help you to make more informed decisions. If a certain negative keyword has a high predicted impact on conversions but isn’t that important, perhaps you choose to not add the keyword or refine it slightly to not accidentally exclude queries that don’t help achieve your marketing objective.

How many keywords can I predict impact for?

For now, you can predict impact for up to 10 keywords at a time. If you wish to review the impact of more keywords, you can add them in batches of 10 at a time.

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