After adding negatives, you might feel like you have cut wasted ad spend but what about the sales you just blocked?

While auditing a newly onboarded account we noticed something that could silently impact your sales by adding relevant keywords in negative phrase match.

Now, you might be wondering why would anyone do that? We thought the same at first. But then we realized that not everyone fully understands when to use negative phrase vs negative exact and let me explain this with a scenario.

Suppose you're selling a giant teddy bear and see low conversions for certain search terms, adding them to negative phrase might seem like a quick fix. But this can block your ads from appearing on any related searches in the future even ones that could convert. The result? You might wonder why sales suddenly dropped.

Instead, always use negative exact for low performing but relevant terms. Use negative phrase only for completely irrelevant keywords.
For example, if you're promoting a menstrual cup and see searches for pads in your search term, then in that case you should add "pads" as a negative phrase since it targets a different audience. But blocking "cup" in a phrase match could cut off potential sales.
Small details like this can make a big difference. Always go deeper while analyzing the sales performance.