Advertising
What is Negative Keyword?
A term you explicitly block, so your ad never shows against it. It is the cheapest lever in an ad account, because every irrelevant click you stop paying for is money returned with no downside.
Why it matters in practice
Negatives are how a broad or automatic campaign stays useful over time: those campaign types are designed to explore, and exploring means paying for a share of searches that were never going to buy from you. It matters because the waste is invisible in a top-line report, where a hundred small irrelevant clicks look like healthy traffic rather than a leak. In practice the work is a routine rather than a project: read the search term report on a schedule, and block the terms that spent real money without converting, plus the ones that are simply the wrong product. Worked in words: a seller of a heavy-duty version of a product pays repeatedly for searches with the word cheap in them, converts almost none of them, and fixes it permanently with a single negative rather than by lowering a bid.
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