Negative keywords
Keywords decide where your ad can appear. Negative keywords decide where it must not. They are how you stop paying for irrelevant searches and how you keep your own campaigns from bidding against each other.
Updated
Broad match keywords and Search Match reach searches you never listed. Some of those searches are valuable discoveries; others are irrelevant, or already covered by a more precise keyword elsewhere in the account. Negative keywords filter out the second group so spend goes where you intend.
Campaign vs ad group negatives
Apple Ads lets you add negative keywords at two levels, and the level decides how far the exclusion reaches.
| Level | Applies to | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign | Every ad group in the campaign | Terms that are never relevant for that campaign, such as unrelated product categories |
| Ad group | Only that ad group | Routing a search to a different ad group in the same campaign, or excluding a term from one theme only |
Negatives do not carry across campaigns. A negative in your discovery campaign has no effect on your brand or category campaigns, which is exactly what makes them useful for controlling overlap.
Exact and broad negatives
- Exact negative. Blocks the specific search and its close variants. It is the precise tool: use it to exclude a term from one place without affecting related searches.
- Broad negative. Blocks any search that contains the negative keyword’s words. It is the blunt tool: use it for words that make a search irrelevant wherever they appear, and review what it blocks.
Preventing overlap between discovery and exact campaigns
Most Apple Ads accounts run a discovery campaign with broad keywords and Search Match alongside campaigns of exact keywords for proven terms. Without negatives, the discovery campaign keeps matching the same searches the exact campaigns target. Your campaigns end up competing for the same traffic, and the results split in ways that make both harder to read.
- Review the search terms report for the discovery campaign.
- Promote search terms that bring trials and subscriptions into an exact-match campaign or ad group.
- Add each promoted term as an exact negative in the discovery campaign, so the exact keyword owns that search.
- Add irrelevant terms as negatives where they appeared, at campaign level if they are irrelevant everywhere.
- Repeat on a regular schedule, because new search terms keep appearing.
The same logic applies between brand and generic campaigns: adding your brand terms as negatives in generic and discovery campaigns keeps brand traffic, which usually converts best, in the campaign built for it.
Choosing negatives in a subscription app
The obvious negatives are searches that are clearly irrelevant. The less obvious ones are searches that look relevant and bring downloads but rarely lead to a trial or a subscription. Judged on cost per download, they look fine. Judged on cost per trial and cost per subscriber, they are where budget leaks.
Before you negate a term, check it against in-app outcomes over a long enough window for trials to convert. Before you add a broad negative, check which converting search terms it would also block.