Exclude 'flowers' and your ad can still show for 'red flower'

A negative broad match keyword for flowers stops your ad on a search for red flowers, and your ad can still serve on red flower. That is Google's own example, and it is working as documented.

Your other keywords work the opposite way. Google says that by default all keyword match types are eligible to match to close variants, and there's no way to opt out. For exact match keywords those may include misspellings, singular or plural forms, stemmings, abbreviations or accents.

Negative keywords won't match to close variants or other expansions. For Search campaigns, Google says you'll need to add synonyms and singular or plural versions if you want to exclude them. Google adds that negative keywords automatically account for casing and misspellings, so you don't need to add those separately.

Our reading: the same word reaches different searches depending on which list it sits in. A keyword can bring in the plural; a negative cannot keep the plural out. We think that gap, more than any one match type choice, is why negative lists leak.

This is Riibon's practice, not Google's instruction. When a search term earns a negative, we write each form of the word our keywords would have matched: the singular, the plural, and the synonyms people actually type.

We leave out the misspellings. Google already covers them for negatives, and a list padded with them is harder to read when someone audits it later.

Riibon's own negative keyword simulator, the tool we use to preview what a proposed negative would block, follows the same rule. It deliberately does no stemming and no synonym expansion, because a simulator that did would report blocks Google would not apply.

A week later we read the search terms report again. Google says a close variant is indicated in the Match type column. Our rule is wider than that label: a variant of a word we excluded turning up anywhere in the report means the negative needs another form.

Google says broader match types capture all the queries of narrower match types, plus more: a broad match keyword will match all the searches of equivalent phrase and exact match keywords, plus additional related searches.

Our reading: pause the exact match keyword [red shoes] while red shoes stays live on broad match, and the search red shoes can still reach your ad through the broad keyword. The search terms report will list it against a different keyword, which is easy to read as a new search rather than the old one coming back.

If a search should never trigger an ad, the instrument is a negative, written in every form you want blocked. If a broader keyword still covers it, pausing only changes which keyword gets the credit.

Your ad might still show when someone searches for a phrase that's longer than 16 words, and your negative keyword follows that 16th word.

Accents and ampersands count. Google says negative keywords with accent marks are considered two different negative keywords, like sidewalk cafe and sidewalk café, and that socks & shoes is different from socks and shoes.

And Display is a different instrument. Google says negative keywords work differently for Display and Video campaigns than they do for search, and that for display campaigns a set of negative keywords will be excluded as an exact topic.

None of this is hidden. Our view is that the rule is easy to miss because it runs the opposite way to your other keywords, which is how an account ends up excluding one spelling of a word and paying for the other.